


Now What I'm Gonna Say May Sound Indelicate

by IfItHollers



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Asphyxiation, Bodily Fluids, Bodily Functions, Body Horror, Canon-Typical Homophobia, Canon-Typical Racism, Coming Out, Disordered Eating, Eating Disorders, Eddie Kaspbrak Gets Divorced, Eddie Kaspbrak Lives, Emetophobia, Erotic Nightmares, Explicit Sexual Content, Fantasizing, Fix-It, Frozen Yogurt, Getting Together, Injury Recovery, Internalized Homophobia, Lots of conversations, M/M, Making Out, Masturbation in Shower, Medical Inaccuracies, Painkillers, Past Drug Use, Size Kink, Stanley Uris Lives, acts of service, canon-typical HIV/AIDS stigma, canon-typical leprosy stigma, eddie kaspbrak explores his sexuality in teeny-tiny steps, eroticized asphyxiation imagery, mike's book backstory, mix of book and film canon, orthorexia, richie tozier's all-dead rock show, scalp massage, stephen we need to talk about leprosy, the persistent sexual threat of eddie's childhood phobias
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-01-14
Updated: 2021-02-08
Packaged: 2021-02-27 14:12:51
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 23
Words: 337,427
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22258507
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/IfItHollers/pseuds/IfItHollers
Summary: Eddie Kaspbrak has lived his whole life being told that he's delicate, and he's not. And nearly bleeding out in an alien fear demon's lair has helped him realize that--as well as what he can live through. It puts his priorities in some perspective.What he is, is injured. And married. To like, a woman. And gay. And stupidly, stupidly in love with Richie Tozier, after all these years. And he'd like to use his new lease on life to act on many of these things, if only Richie would cooperate.
Relationships: Ben Hanscom/Beverly Marsh, Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier, Patricia Blum Uris/Stanley Uris
Comments: 1494
Kudos: 2515





	1. Sunk Cost Fallacy

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello! I thought that this was going to be a one-shot, even if I was going to do it for NaNoWriMo and try to publish 50K in one chapter. Turns out, it is not. This is the size-kink fic I've been meaning to write since late October, I don't know how long it's going to be, and there's going to be a lot of plot and slowburn before I can get to the scenes I'm dying to write, but I can't live with this chapter on my phone anymore.
> 
> Content warnings: medical drama, Eddie is badly hurt and still in the hospital, Eddie's on morphine and experiences some bad side-effects, mentions of blood, blood transfusions, blood clots, Eddie passes out, discussions of seizures, discussions of traumatic injury (not mentioned in detail), injuries sustained during CPR, discussions of suicide attempts (Stan). IVs, needles, bandages, chest drain, catheter, other medical treatment. Dream hallucinations. Flies. Mentions of immigration, race, and prejudice. Mentions of Jeff Dunham. Frankly disconcerting lust for Sprite. Richie Tozier's All-Dead Rock Show. Frozen (2013) reference. Discussion of economic- and business-decision making as an excuse for a dramatic entrance.
> 
> If there is anything else in this chapter that you think I need to warn for at the top, PLEASE TELL ME. I promise it's not all going to be doom and gloom. Also there will be explicit sexual content in this fic, but I have no idea when. The title is, unfortunately, a _Hamilton_ reference. I will not apologize.
> 
> Thanks to [qianwanshi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/qianwanshi/pseuds/qianwanshi) for being my first reader. Also thanks to everyone who played the sentence game with me on tumblr for my WIPs, and to the people on Twitter who have been so enthusiastic about the things I've mentioned for this project. Here we go.

First Eddie sleeps, and then he hears talking. At first the talking seems rather unimportant—constant background noise the way that a fan in a room is calming—and then the more he wakes up the more he becomes aware of individual words.

“—starts out up here with the _you’re so square_ , and then—” The voice suddenly drops into a bass. “—goes way down here with the _baby I don’t care_.” Then back to normal, familiar register: “I fucking love it when songs do that, man, it’s hot, I’ll fuckin’ say it. I don’t know if you remember the nurse yelling at me or what or I’d play you—there’s this song that does it, I don’t remember the name or who sang it but the album art is this frying pan with eggs and bacon in it, but inside one of the eggs is a lion’s mouth snarling? Anyway.”

Eddie thinks _nurse?_ in confusion but then his exhaustion settles on him again. He’s sure there’s something on the other side of his eyelids—someone talking his ear off, someone there with him—but he can’t quite approach. There’s pressure in his chest, like bad heartburn, and he thinks that if he’s sleeping he ought to be sleeping sitting up with pillows stacked behind him, but he can’t find his body.

“…don’t know if you’ve heard of this—it’s like the planes that came back from World War One? World War Two? One of them. And people were looking at all the bullet holes and going, _Well that’s where you should reinforce it,_ until someone pointed out, _Hey, jackass, these are the planes that made it back, the ones that got shot in other places crashed over Germany,_ you know? So you hear about like a half inch one way, a half inch the other way. Like, uh, what’s it—” Faint clicking, someone snapping their fingers. “—motorcycle helmets. When they started requiring them, all these motorcyclists with head injuries came into the ER. Because they weren’t in the morgue. There’s a word for that, but I don’t know, I was shit at propaganda, I passed public speaking through sheer… well, you know…”

This is important, he’s sure of it. The voice says _You know_ in a way more meaningful than a vocal tic, like they really expect Eddie to know. The words pass through his brain the way speech in a dream works—he gets bits and pieces and he can’t hang on to the full train of thought, he just knows that this is important and he can’t tell why.

“…and then it goes _oo wee oo I look just like Buddy Holly_ —which, for the record, I totally fucking did, once upon a time, okay? Write it down. When you, uh, wake up and—never mind. And then it goes _oh oh and you’re Mary Tyler Moore_. But his wife was, uh… something Catholic. Maria something. She was from Puerto Rico. He asked her to marry him on their first date, can you even imagine? You’re on a date with fucking Buddy Holly and he just—hands you a flower and proposes marriage, and you’re like _fuck yeah you’re Buddy Holly_. Like, yeah, babe, you got stones…”

Eddie thinks _Buddy Holly?_ and in his struggle to try to remember what the fuck Buddy Holly looks like, he thinks _glasses_ and then he thinks _Richie_. Holy shit, that’s Richie talking to him.

There’s a loud beeping sound and Richie goes abruptly quiet.

Eddie thinks _No no no I have to tell him_ and sinks back under.

“…think you’d fucking hate it, actually, I don’t know. The whole… juxtaposition of rock and roll with religion—which like, _yeah_ , obviously, but you were always more into that than me—I think you straight up told me I was going to hell once, which I _hope_ so, and then you and Stan argued about whether hell existed at all, and that was a fucking lot, and then I splashed you and you freaked out about piranhas—I swear to God and Don McLean, Eds, you thought there were piranhas in the Kenduskeag, I cannot make this shit up…”

Richie makes a lot of shit up, Eddie knows, but not his own material. But there’s something Eddie’s supposed to tell him, and he can’t for the life of him remember it because Richie is rattling on about… _something_ Eddie can’t grasp, though he doesn’t know why his gut instinct about the piranhas is to go _fuck you_. That’s not what he’s supposed to tell Richie.

His chest really hurts.

“…found his glasses in, like, the eighties, they’d been in lockup as evidence, and then there was this court case about whether they should go to his wife or his parents, because they’d only been married for like six months…”

He should sit up, take some Tums, drink some water, eat some bread or something to soak up the stomach acid. That beeping rises in his ear again and then sinks away.

The next time he hears Richie, he’s singing “American Pie.” He’s a good mimic—never had a problem with parroting the latest song on the radio, could do an eerie Robert Smith when The Cure came on—but he’s not a singer himself. Their choral teacher used to despair of him, in grade school. Richie rattles along without music but with perfect timing, “ _Do you believe in rock ‘n’ roll? Can music save your mortal soul? And…”_ He slows down, some of the cheer in his voice sinking low and serious. “… _can you teach me how to dance real slow?”_ He stretches it out like taffy.

Eddie remembers in quick succession the words to “American Pie,” what he was supposed to tell Richie, and the fact that he got impaled through the torso. Suddenly the pain in his chest is obliterating, whiting him out, and his eyes snap open with a burst of stars.

Richie says, _“Jesus,”_ and there’s a crash.

Eddie loses track, somewhat, of what happens after that. The pain dies down in his chest and knifes through his skull as the light pours into his eyes, and then that bodily grievance fades too. It lurks somewhere deep in him, below his conscious radar.

There’s a metal bar in front of him. He’s lying on his side, and he can’t feel the arm under him. The crash was evidently Richie falling out of a chair because now he’s scrabbling up and taking up Eddie’s whole field of vision, all glasses and wide dark eyes and shoulders.

“Hey, you awake, Eddie? You okay? This for real or one of those zombie blinks you’ve been doing, huh?” His hands come up like he’s going to touch Eddie, but then he drops them again.

Eddie stares at him and feels it—his heart clenching like a fist in his chest, just looking at him. He’s in pain but _Richie’s_ here, and it’s going to be okay. He closes his eyes and grits his teeth against the wave of pressure that passes through his chest, wanting to bow forward but somehow immobilized. There’s a pillow jammed between his body and the metal bar, and much as he’d like to move, roll over, sit up, he can’t.

“Oh shit,” Richie says. Eddie opens his eyes and blinks. “Are you in pain? You’re not supposed to feel anything right now, your blood volume’s back to normal and you’re supposed to—” He turns to look over his shoulder and Eddie stares at the sharp clear line of his jaw before he turns back. He looks—like hell, actually, he needs a shave and he’s lost weight and his hair is _wild_ in a way that Eddie remembers. Richie used to get bored and play with it and then he’d wander around looking like he’d gone through a dryer on the spin cycle, and Maggie Tozier despaired of him. In the fourth grade Mrs. Wilson actually summoned Richie over to her desk and brushed his hair right there, in the classroom, while Richie winced and whined.

Eddie has to tell him, so he swallows with his mouth dry as paper and tries to speak. His voice comes out in a little wheeze, and there’s an itch in his chest, somewhere deep down in his lungs. If he’d ever had bronchitis, he would understand that bubbling under his ribs. If he’d ever had pneumonia, he would understand the crackle. As it is, he only knows that instead of _I_ what comes out is “Hh…”

Wild-eyed, Richie’s gaze snaps to his face. “Come on, Eds, nod or shake—are you in pain?”

It’s _not important_ , because Eddie is learning something he learned long ago and forgot about—that he can be in pain and he can live through it. That the things he thought all along would destroy him have room for him, somewhere in there. He’s not exactly in pain but he is, at the same time, and it’s not a question with a nice neat answer, and Richie isn’t _listening_ to him.

Richie brings up one fist, first bobbing it up and down and then shaking it from side to side. “Yes? No?”

Eddie rolls his eyes.

Richie bursts out laughing. “Oh thank god, you’re in there.” He shakes his head, then reaches out and grabs either side of Eddie’s head just above the ears, and plants a kiss on his forehead. He needs to shave; his stubble grates Eddie’s skin.

It is incredibly difficult to focus his eyes on Richie when he’s that close up. Eddie has a good perspective on his throat, his Adam’s apple, his collarbone, his T-shirt under another Hawaiian monstrosity under a leather jacket that for some reason doesn’t look quite right. Under the smell of leather there’s the stale smell of a body made to hurry up and wait. Eddie knows it from airports, from taxi trips, from business meetings that could have been emails, all salt and celery and something warm and animal wicking away. This is _Richie_ , though. Eddie has an absurd instinct to stick his tongue out like he might have when they were kids, to pull a face, to just tap his skin once with that dry, dry touch.

He does not lick Richie. His mouth is so dry anyway.

Richie leans back, relief printed in the corners of his eyes, which are watering. “The last couple of times you woke up, you just looked at me like you had no idea who the fuck I was. Which, like, I can’t blame you, because—” He gestures at his own face with splayed fingers. He blinks several times. Eddie gets distracted by his eyelashes before he realizes that Richie is trying not to cry.

Eddie squints at him, trying to convey _what’s the matter?_ with just his eyes.

“Yeah, I know,” Richie says, which is not a correct response to Eddie’s question, so Eddie must have failed in his attempts at eye-telepathy. He looks around again, all sharp profile, nose and chin. “Where’s the _fucking doctor_? Christ. Okay.” He turns back to look at Eddie and whispers, “Hey, buddy, if you remember what happened, _please_ don’t tell the docs about the alien clown, because they aren’t too thrilled with me spending all my time in the ICU, I don’t want to know what they’re gonna do if I try to hang out in the psych ward with you, we’d have to call Stan about making a prison break and I don’t know what the fuck the protocols are like in Georgia but here—”

Eddie closes his eyes, trying to clear his head. He feels faintly dizzy and not quite aware of his body. There’s pain but it isn’t important. There are hands, but they aren’t important.

“Hey, hey, hey,” Richie says, and Eddie blinks his eyes open again. “Can you stay awake for the doctors? Please? They should be _fucking coming any minute now_ , Jesus Christ I hate Maine. Come on, buddy.”

“Ri-chie,” Eddie says. His mouth seems intimidated by the second syllable, the _ch_ like some insurmountable hurdle, and the vowels slur out of his mouth on an elastic stretch. His face feels cold and tingly, and his lips a little numb.

 _You’re about to pass out,_ his brain informs him helpfully, but there’s no wave of panic that accompanies that thought. He’s already on his side, laying down. His vision’s not fogging up or anything, and there’s no encroaching blackness. There’s just a steady slowness to his heartbeat—which he feels in his ears as he realizes that the beeping above is a heart monitor. He’s on a heart monitor.

“Yeah,” Richie says. “Yeah, I’m here. You all there, Eds?” Oh god, is Richie about to cry?

“I love you,” he says.

The words stumble out of his mouth in descending articulation; the _you_ is almost mumbled. As soon as he’s said them he feels his whole body go slack in relief— _there, there it is,_ he thought he was going to die before he managed to get them out, before he managed to tell Richie.

Richie’s face changes not at all, but he blinks once. He reaches out carefully and touches a fingertip just under Eddie’s eyebrow and lifts his eyelid slightly.

“Oh, sweetheart, they’ve got you on the good drugs, don’t they?” His mouth quirks up at the corner, and Eddie _knows_ that look, the _we’re going to laugh about this later_ look, and Eddie wants to say _No!_ but he can feel himself slipping.

 _Sweetheart_. His mind latches onto that. _Sweetheart_. Somewhere deep inside himself, Eddie Kaspbrak wraps his arms around that word and hugs it to his chest, a life buoy, as the room sinks away.

* * *

“Mr. Kaspbrak?” It’s an unfamiliar woman’s voice.

Eddie startles awake hard. There’s an almost anesthetizing effect to the fear—his chest is so cold and his heart thudding so hard that he feels no pain at all. There’s just the squealing of his heart monitor, and the sound of him trying to catch his breath, and the nurse gasping in response.

“I’m sorry!” she says. “Are you okay?”

She’s wearing bright blue scrubs over a long-sleeved green t-shirt, and she barely clears five feet tall. Maybe the least intimidating person he’s ever seen. She looks just as horrified to have startled Eddie as he feels for his own foolish response.

He tries to take a few deep breaths to calm himself, but that foggy numbness in his chest means he gets no satisfaction from it. No reassurance that he’s processing oxygen. Just the dim knowledge that _something_ should hurt and vague disquiet that it doesn’t.

He read, a long time ago, that pain is a signal that something is wrong. That’s all it is. He spent his whole life expecting it as a symptom—he knew something was wrong, so there must be pain, and when there wasn’t he had to look for it. Every ache in his body, every stomach cramp, every stiff joint or achy neck in the morning, the way his knees started throbbing when he turned twenty—he anticipated them all. When they arrived it was with klaxons singing out, _This is it, Eddie! Here it comes!_

And then nothing.

“I’m okay?” he manages. He doesn’t mean it to be a question, but that’s how it comes out. He tries to refocus on the person asking him the question. “I’m okay.”

“Good,” she says. She comes a little closer to his bed, unclips his chart from its hook on the footboard, and glances up at his heart monitor. The dinging alarm cuts out abruptly, replaced by the electronic beep of Eddie’s pulse. “I really am sorry about that.”

“It’s all right.” He feels awkward, on his side in this hospital bed, swaddled up between safety rails and with a waffle blanket draped over him. She’s a stranger and his instinct is to be polite, but he has no idea what the social expectations are for intensive care patients. “I’ve been told I’m excitable.”

He’s been told a lot of things.

“Oh really?” She makes a note on his chart. “Do you think you’re excitable?”

He considers that. He wouldn’t call… look, he goes off on rants and tangents and tirades, but he doesn’t know that he’s been excited for any of them. He says what has to be said, and once it’s out in the world he can come down from it.

“I don’t know what I am,” he says. It comes out sincerer than he means it—but there’s a little wonder in it, too.

The nurse smiles. “Well, let’s start with your pain. Do you remember the scale I showed you?”

He stares at her and then manages, “I’m sorry, I don’t.”

“That’s okay,” she says. “Do you have pain?”

“No,” he replies honestly.

“That’s good,” she tells him. “Let me just run a few checks here, and then I think we’ll go for a walk, all right?”

He blinks and then glances down at his own body. His shoulder eclipses most of his torso, and from hip to toes he’s hidden by the waffle blanket, but the last thing he remembers is being impaled. As in, stabbed in the back so it came out the front.

“I can walk?” he asks.

“Every couple of hours,” the nurse confirms. “It’s important to keep your circulation going. Nowhere exciting, just around the room again, but we need to get you on your feet.”

Eddie blinks a few times, completely nonplussed. But she seems to think he can get up, and she’s a nurse. “Okay,” he says, and waits.

She checks his face, and then the little monitor clipped to his index finger. Then she calls in another nurse and, between the two of them, they get Eddie up and out of the bed.

He is wearing a hospital gown. Both the nurses are small enough to fit below his arms, their shoulders pressed into his armpits, their arms supporting his back. He’s very aware of his bare ass, as they creep around the room at a snail’s pace, slowly wheeling the IV and other plastic bags Eddie’s hooked to along with them. He feels almost nothing from his bare feet, not the linoleum under his soles, not even his own weight.

“Am I supposed to… not be able to feel anything?” he asks slowly. Moving this slowly makes his brain feel like he has to speak slowly too. His thoughts ooze like syrup.

“Like what?” asks the second nurse. She has her head shaved on one side and a flop of purple hair across the top. It’s extremely trendy. Myra would hate it.

“Your hair looks very nice,” he tells her. “It’s very bright.”

She smiles. “Thank you. What do you think you should be feeling?”

He looks down at his feet, at the vascularity marbling down his bare legs.

“I just feel cold,” he says.

“Would you like some socks?”

They put him and his equipment and tubes back in place on the bed, and then the first nurse retrieves some socks from the cabinet over the sink. She rolls the socks onto his feet and—Eddie doesn’t feel warmer, per se, but when they pull the blanket back up over him he can feel the impression of heat he left in the bedding. He waits for it to comfort him, for it to soak into his body again, but the little wisps of warmth fade from his notice.

“Comfortable?” the first nurse asks.

“Not uncomfortable,” he says. And that’s not bad. The absence of discomfort, after forty years, is an improvement.

* * *

He has never dreamed like this before. He’s aware of himself in this hospital bed, aware of his cheek pressed into the flat disposable pillow and the safety rail holding him up. But he also can see outside himself—not in perfect detail, but bleached out by the bright fluorescents shining down on him. He sees his body and is aware of his weakness and his inability to move.

There are flies landing on him. He cannot feel them walking on him, but he can see them. Fat indistinct black blobs. He cannot move to swat them away.

He hears the door open and voices talking—not Richie, a man and a woman, familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. He cannot move. It’s just the flies on him.

“—middle school. You want all the dirty secrets, these are the guys to ask.” The voice is a man, tired but faintly amused. Like he’s happy and washed out at once.

“Oh yeah?” the woman asks. “Good stories?”

“Let me think.” There’s a pause. Then: “The first date I took a girl on was to a laundromat.”

The woman laughs. “Really?”

“I mean, technically.”

Eddie goes in and out a little bit, watching the flies--he knows that they are flies, but he also knows they’re missing things, like eyes and wings, which is how he knows he’s dreaming--land on him. He feels as though someone is watching him, and he can almost see a face, but nothing clear. It’s dream logic again.

He knows what sleep paralysis is, but there’s no horror sitting on his chest or anything--and he’s had plenty of horror in the last… Well, he doesn’t know how long it’s been since he came back to Derry. He’s had a lifetime’s worth of horror, and no one can dispute that.

The next time the nurses come in and wake him up, he goes heavily. He has to blink several times before he can take stock of the room and notice that his guests--he thinks they were guests--are no longer there, and that the nurse with the purple hair is trying to get his attention.

“It’s too much morphine,” he tells her, his lips feeling numb.

She touches his face gently, turning his chin up and looking at his mouth; taking his hand in hers and examining his nails. “Are you breathing okay?”

“I don’t know,” he tells her honestly. When he thinks about it he starts breathing manually, but he can’t feel an ache in his chest or the constriction of what he used to think were asthma attacks. He can’t feel anything at all. No signals from his body telling him whether things are all right or if there’s something wrong.

_Where is Richie?_

The nurse with the purple hair clips a meter to his index finger and reports with a frown that his pulse-ox is a little low. “We’ll reduce the dosage,” she says. “You’re still replenishing your blood volume, even after the transfusions, so it’s likely that you’re going to feel pain.”

“That’s okay,” he says, because it is. He’s lived through pain--and now that he’s no longer in a sewer with a demon claw through his torso, it has to be downhill from here, right? Every other pain he’s going to experience will be less than that. A little reminder that something’s wrong--that there’s a breach in his cheek, in his chest--but that he lived through it. “I’m hallucinating when I sleep.”

The nurse frowns. “Hallucinating?”

“I could hear people talking,” he says, “but there were flies landing on me, and I couldn’t move.”

Her frown deepens. “Flies?”

“Dream flies,” he says. “Like I was dead.”

“Yeah, we’ll bring your dosage down,” she says. “I’ll make a note in your chart, we’ll get it approved.”

She and the first nurse get him up on his feet and make him walk around a bit. He’s amazed that they’re able to hold him up, small and slight as they both look, and dizzy and heavy as he feels. But the next thing he knows he’s back in the bed and they’re adjusting his pillows and asking him to sit up and do some deep breathing for them.

“I’ve forgotten your names,” he says apologetically.

The one with the purple hair smiles. “Tracy.” Now that he’s no longer at risk of falling, the other nurse has left the room. “And that was Sarah.”

“Tracy and Sarah,” he says slowly, trying to imprint it in his sieve of a memory. Tracy has purple hair. He thinks he can remember that.

Tracy counts for him as he tries to breathe according to her rhythm. He tries to look down at his chest to see if his stomach is expanding as he breathes, but he’s so thickly bandaged and padded that he can’t, and looking at the clean white gauze that his body vanished into makes him feel insubstantial. Eventually he has to tilt his head back and apologize, but he’s too dizzy to keep going.

“That’s all right,” she says. “You can rest for a minute.”

He isn’t sure what happens next, but he feels better as he relaxes back into the pillows. Distantly he hears shouting and beeping and someone yell, “The patient’s having a seizure!” He thinks consciously, _Oh, poor patient,_ but then he fades out again.

* * *

“Mr. Kaspbrak,” says a low, thickly-accented male voice.

Eddie opens his eyes. There’s pain in his chest and in his head, and he can feel sweat drying all over his skin. He’s cold.

The doctor in the room with him is tall, black, and young. He looks very calm.

“Can you tell me your name?” he asks.

Eddie swallows against his dry throat and says, “Edward Francis Kaspbrak.”

“Good. And your date of birth?”

“November third, 1976,” he replies.

“Good,” the doctor says. His coat looks very clean. It still hangs stiffly, as though he’s just put it on. “Can you tell me what day it is?”

Eddie thinks about it and has to admit, “No.” Quickly, because he doesn’t want the doctor to get the wrong idea about his mental state, he says, “I’ve been sleeping a lot, but I came to Derry on August twenty-sixth, and I think I was here for maybe two days before… I got hurt?”

“Of what year?”

“2016.”

“And who is the president?”

“Barack Obama,” he replies.

“And you know where you are, yeah?”

Eddie blinks at him a couple of times. “The hospital?”

“No, I mean, what town.”

“Oh. Derry, Maine.” He blinks once and then considers the likelihood of Derry Home Hospital being able to repair whatever damage was done to his body. “At least, last time I checked.”

“We’ll give you that one,” the doctor says. “You’re at the Sovereign Light Hospital in Bangor, Maine. You got the state right, at least.”

Eddie feels mildly put out by that. If he was moved around while he was unconscious, he doesn’t feel that ought to be held against him.

“I’m Dr. LaCroix,” the man says, turning to look directly at him instead of at the clipboard in his hands. “Was that your first seizure?”

Eddie stares at him for several long seconds before he manages, “My first _what_?”

“I guess that’s a yes,” Dr. LaCroix says. “Do you remember what happened?”

“I told them they needed to turn down my dose,” Eddie says. “The--I don’t remember what I was on for pain, but the nurse--she kept checking my oxygen, she asked me if I was breathing--I was overdosed, right? She said I was replenishing my blood volume, that was probably the problem--did she say I had a transfusion? Where did the blood come from? Did you have to blood type me? I’m B-positive.”

The doctor’s brow furrows a little bit. He makes a show of raising the clipboard and writing a note, saying slowly as he does so, “Patient presents as alert and energetic.”

Eddie can’t help himself. He snorts and reclines hard against the pillows.

“To answer your question...s,” Dr. LaCroix says. “I agree that the morphine drip they had you on was likely too frequent considering your weight and your still-replenishing blood volume. You’ve had a number of blood transfusions, some from our stock of donated blood, some from volunteers. Your emergency contact, Ms. Marsh, was one of them. Is that your wife?”

Eddie swallows. “No,” he says, and then feels like he has to explain. “I mean, no, she’s… she’s my best friend, really, she’s like my sister. I mean, one of my best friends--we were… we met back when we were in middle school. That’s who I was with. I mean, not just her, there were six people.”

Dr. LaCroix makes an affirmative noise. “Yes, six people, five of whom volunteered to be blood typed to donate for you. You’re lucky you had a B and an O in the group. Four pints isn’t much, but you needed all you could get right then, if I’m reading this right. And you’ve had visitors almost constantly. You’re a lucky man.”

Eddie looks at him and manages, “I don’t really remember what happened after the accident. I mean, I don’t know… what the damage was. I’m missing… I mean, the nurses said they’d introduced themselves before, but I only remember seeing them one or two times.”

Dr. LaCroix’s face becomes blank and unreadable. “I’m not your primary physician here,” he says. “I responded when they called that there was an ICU patient having a seizure--but I don’t think you had one. Some people twitch when they pass out, is all. You’ve seen a number of doctors but the one in charge of your case is Dr. Fox.” He looks down at the clipboard. “Says she spoke to you after the surgery. But sometimes patients forget, coming out of the anesthesia and all.”

Eddie blinks once and then twice. He’s had surgery. Intellectually he knew that he’d probably had surgery--you don’t get an injury like he had without some surgery to repair the damage, they weren’t just going to pump him full of Bev’s blood without doing something to stop the leak in his chest and the damage to his organs--but hearing it said like it’s something he should know is weird.

“I don’t remember a Dr. Fox,” he says.

Dr. LaCroix nods slowly and says, “That’s all right. How you feeling right now, Edward?”

“Eddie,” he says automatically.

Dr. LaCroix smiles. His teeth are very white. “Eddie.”

He takes a couple of deep breaths, preparing himself, and is almost pleased to feel the ache in his chest and back when he does so. It’s not a stabbing pain, it’s a stretching pain. Some feedback from his body, warning him that there’s something wrong and not to overdo it, but reassuringly stable. There’s a chill between his thighs that he hopes is just sweat. He’s gonna be just mortified if it turns out he peed himself.

“Not bad,” he says. “Only hurts when I breathe, you know.”

Dr. LaCroix whistles. “You must be tough as nails, Eddie. Or you still got too much morphine in your system.”

“This is good,” he says. He breathes again to feel the ache. “No, this is good. I couldn’t feel anything earlier, that was… that was not good, but this isn’t bad. I’m…” He swallows again, doing a systems check. “I’m cold? And kind of thirsty?”

“Probably ought to replenish your blood sugar,” Dr. LaCroix says. “We’re gonna wait a little bit and then see if you can have some juice or a soda or something without throwing up, all right? I can get you some ice for now.”

He’s cold. The idea of more cold does not appeal, but the inside of his mouth tastes like death.

“Ice would be good,” he says.

Dr. LaCroix nods, opens the door, and leans out. Eddie hears low speaking. The doctor’s voice is easy to pick out, with its low rhythmic rise and fall.

Richie would like that, Eddie thinks. He met the Irish cop all of one time back in the Barrens the day they built the dam, and spent the rest of his life busting out his best Irish accent at the nearest opportunity. Part of Eddie wants to see if it’s gotten any better over the years. Part of him doesn’t want to give Richie the opportunity--it’s much funnier watching them come up organically.

When the doctor comes back in, Eddie says quietly, “Can I ask where your accent’s from?” Then, realizing how he’s absolutely going to come across like a racist man from backwoods Maine, he says, “I have a friend. He collects accents.”

“Collects accents?” Dr. LaCroix repeats.

Somehow Eddie doesn’t think explaining that Richie’s a semi-famous comedian will help the situation, because Richie’s latest content is pretty offensive. “He does voices,” he offers weakly. “He wanted to be a ventriloquist when we were kids.”

“A ventriloquist,” Dr. LaCroix says. Then he asks, “Not like that puppet guy, eh?”

Like most people, Eddie remembers consuming Jeff Dunham specials back in 2008 or so and laughing. He feels vaguely guilty about that now. Myra was right next to him telling him how offensive they were, and in a lot of ways she was right.

“Not like the puppet guy,” Eddie says.

Dr. LaCroix nods. “Port of Spain,” he says, and when Eddie looks blank he offers, “Trinidad.”

“Oh,” Eddie says, because he knows where Trinidad and Tobago is. Vaguely. He has an idea.

“Don’t get nervous,” Dr. LaCroix says. “I got my degree in Toronto.”

“I’m not nervous,” Eddie replies, and is startled to find that it’s true. He’s awkward, he’s like a blunt instrument trying to get through this conversation about race and immigration and prejudiced assumptions, but he’s not nervous.

Tracy comes back with a dish of ice chips and a can of Sprite. She asks Eddie how he’s feeling and he responds honestly that he’s okay, and Dr. LaCroix pats him amicably on the top of the foot and says he’s signing Eddie back over to Dr. Fox. Eddie eats his ice chips but keeps looking at the can of soda, sweating on the countertop over there.

Tracy follows his eyeline. “You feel nauseous at all?”

“No.”

He’s thinking about sugar, about tooth decay, about the ways that dental problems can result in heart problems later down the line. He’s thinking about how he never drinks soda, even when he’s out in restaurants, because he made promises to his mother and his health teacher and his dentist and his wife.

He wants that soda so bad. At this moment, Eddie Kaspbrak cannot remember anything he’s ever wanted more than that can of Sprite. He could not be more enthusiastic about it if Lebron James himself came in and asked him if he wanted one.

“Okay.” Tracy pops the tab on the can with a crack and hiss. She half-holds the can for him--Eddie’s right hand is curiously clumsy.

He takes a few sips. The soda almost burns in its intensity, fizzing into his mouth, sugar and citric acid. He swallows and thinks about carbon dioxide, about the bubbles popping in his stomach, about increasing pressure, about burping, about fizzy lifting drinks, about Richie’s frantic Gene Wilder impressions from a long time ago.

“Good?” Tracy asks.

“Really good,” he replies. He drinks more.

* * *

They change his bandages. Apparently sweat is the enemy of his gaping chest wounds—incisions, the medical staff calls them, but the little voice in Eddie’s head that sounds like Richie Tozier definitely has more colorful descriptions. For the one on his back, he can’t look as Tracy wipes down the skin around it, but she definitely tells him not to look while she tends to his exit wound. “You already had one vasovagal event today, and lying down didn’t do anything for it,” she says. “The doc’s gonna come in and give you more instructions, got it?”

Eddie gets it. She’s being very careful as she cleans him up, but he still feels little frissons of pain as she wipes him down. He smells antiseptic. He’s not sure whether to be glad or disappointed when she wraps him back up in new waterproof bandages and ties the neck of his gown back in place. Part of him thinks that she’s a nurse, so she’s probably right that seeing the damage might make him pass out again. Another part of him thinks ( _knows_ ) he’s tougher than that, and that keeping him from seeing it is just prolonging the completely unnecessary suspense.

The next doctor to knock on the door isn’t Dr. LaCroix--whom Eddie is already oddly fond of, considering the man asked him the terrifying question _was that your first seizure?_ \--but instead a woman with a broad face and a bright smile.

“Mr. Kaspbrak,” she says. “I’m Dr. Fox.”

“Eddie,” he corrects immediately. “How are you?”

Her smile widens. “I ought to be asking you that question. I hear you had an event today.”

“It wasn’t bad,” Eddie says, because it wasn’t. He didn’t have a seizure. Dr. LaCroix agreed that he was far too alert and coherent (read: ranty) to have had a seizure. Not that Eddie knows what one feels like. He was mostly happy to discover that the catheter meant he hadn’t peed himself. It may be the happiest any man has ever been to discover that he’s wearing a catheter.

“I guess you have new standards for ‘bad,’” Dr. Fox allows. “Dr. LaCroix told me that you had some confusion over what has happened since you arrived here and that you didn’t remember our conversation post-surgery. I also gave some instructions to your wife--” Eddie isn’t sure what his face does then, but the doctor breaks off immediately. “Not your wife?” she guesses. “Ms. Marsh?”

Eddie relaxes. “Not my wife,” he says. Part of him is flattered that she thinks a man like him could ever marry a woman like Beverly, but then he remembers that he _has_ a wife and what does that say about her? Myra might be unfortunate enough to have a gay husband ( _yeah, Eddie, unfortunate, like you had nothing at all to do with that problem_ ), but there’s no reason for her to have a rude one. “Bev’s a friend. She’s like my sister.”

Dr. Fox nods in what looks like complete understanding. “Right. Have you had a chance to speak with her about what happened?”

Eddie shakes his head slowly. “I only remember talking to one visitor, and the nurses. And Dr. LaCroix, I mean, I remember today. And I know I had guests, but I think my morphine dosage was too high, because I could hear them but I couldn’t respond and I was… having some weird dreams.”

She nods again. “That can be a side effect of morphine. Are you feeling better now that the dose is reduced? How is your pain?”

Eddie’s pain is… present. After Tracy cleaned up his wounds he felt a persistent sting, like she’d made them angry or something. Now it’s the stretching pain, making him alternate between breaths shallow enough not to strain them and deep breaths to test the boundaries of it.

“It’s okay,” he says.

Her face contracts in something like a sympathetic prompt to go on.

Eddie clears his throat awkwardly. “I mean, I can feel something, and that’s better. Earlier when they had me getting up to walk around, I couldn’t feel anything.”

“It’s better to feel some pain than none at all?” she asks, like she’s trying to clarify.

“I couldn’t feel anything at all,” Eddie replies. “I was just cold. I mean, I’m still kind of cold, but.” He shrugs and winces immediately.

“We are keeping the temperature in here low to prevent sweating,” Dr. Fox says. “Tracy tells me she’s discussed the importance of keeping your surgical sites clean. Since you’ve been sleeping a lot, and people naturally sweat when we sleep, we’ve been trying to compensate for that.”

What Eddie hears is that if he spends some time conscious, they’ll turn up the thermostat. “They got me socks,” he offers. “The nurses. Tracy and…” He closes his eyes, trying to think. “Sarah.”

“With the grips on the bottom?”

He nods. If he moves his toes he can still feel the rubbery bottoms of the socks.

“It’s very important that you do not fall when you get up to stretch your legs and move around,” she says. “That’s why I want you to be very careful, only try to get out of bed when the nurses are there to support you, and wear the appropriate footwear. Otherwise, just stay in bed.”

A faint frisson of anxiety goes through him. _Go back to bed, Eddie-bear,_ a voice says from a long, long time ago.

But he just hurt himself shrugging, and he’s not sick. This isn’t an illness, this is an injury.

“Okay,” he agrees.

Dr. Fox smiles again. “So you’ve had three surgeries,” she says. “Your first was at Derry Home Hospital; you had some medical events on the table, and in response they brought you here in a Life Flight helicopter, where you underwent two more surgeries. When the beam went through you it punctured part of your lung, which collapsed, understandably.”

Eddie supposes he can’t hold that against his lung. He collapsed too. He nods for Dr. Fox to go on.

“There are also a lot of major blood vessels in the thoracic cavity,” she says. “The wound was low enough to avoid your heart, and seems to have missed your spine by about an inch and a half. You are very lucky.”

He breathes in and feels his chest ache as though in confirmation. He’s lucky. He gets to live to feel the chest pain. He thinks absurdly of Phineas Gage, that old nineteenth-century medical marvel who had an iron bar drive through his mouth, through his brain, and up out the top of his head, and got up, talked, and walked around after a few minutes. He’s Eddie Kaspbrak. He might not have the traumatic brain injury ( _please don’t let him have a traumatic brain injury_ ), but he feels no less… marvelous.

“When you arrived you had lost a lot of your blood volume. Derry Home Hospital did their best to repair the damage to your blood vessels and supplied you with a transfusion, but your interrupted circulation might have some consequences. We’re a little concerned about potential nerve damage in your right arm. Also you sustained broken ribs while—it’s my understanding—your friends performed CPR on you while waiting for the ambulance.”

“Oh,” Eddie says.

“The friends also donated blood when you arrived, which is good. Hospitals are perpetually in need of more blood—that tided you over while we waited for another delivery from the Red Cross.” She smiled. “You’re still replenishing blood—you did lose a… frankly astonishing amount, to be honest. As a result, some of your responses to the anesthesia and morphine were concerning, but it’s encouraging that you’re as alert as you are now.”

“And you’re going to keep the morphine down?” he asks.

She nods. “We’re going to keep the morphine down. Our strategy is going to be medicating to manage the pain, not medicating to no pain. You still might have some odd dreams, though.”

That’s fine. Eddie’s head already feels clearer.

“When can I go home?” he asks, and feels like a child.

She nods her head in the general vicinity of his side. “We’re waiting to confirm that there’s no more air leaking from your chest cavity. We don’t want to have another collapse. Once your intercostal drain—that’s the tube in your armpit—shows that there’s no more air, and the fluid from your chest has decreased to an expected amount, we’ll take out the chest tube and see about sending you home. Where do you live?”

“New York,” Eddie replies.

Dr. Fox gives him a perplexed look. “So, if you don’t mind my asking, what were you doing in an abandoned house in Maine?”

“Yeah, I was asking myself that too,” Eddie says, and declines to explain in any way that would be useful.

* * *

In a way, Eddie suspects that almost-dying is even more inconvenient than dying would have been. There’s a kind of lawlessness to Derry, a sense that you can get away with anything. (And _fuck_ he needs to ask one of the Losers what the fuck they did with Bowers’s body; is Richie going to be arrested for murder before Eddie can see him again?) The hospital is, by comparison, so regulated that Eddie almost can’t breathe.

Almost. They’re very intent on him breathing here. There are deep breathing exercises every hour, and coughing exercises to come later, once they’re sure he’s not going to tear his stitches. There are brief walks around his room every two hours to be sure that he doesn’t develop blood clots. There are clean white plasters that stick to the skin around his incisions—not _on_ his incisions, but around the stitches so it doesn’t pull on the thread when they have to be removed—and clean white bandages that go over and around his chest and back. It’s all very regulated. The nurses are good about wrapping his bandages just tight enough, and Sarah always finishes them with an oddly pretty knot instead of a metal pin.

There are visiting hours.

He knows he’s had visitors—has reasoned out that Richie was visiting, has thought back on his confused morphine dream and decided it was either Stan or Bill because they’re the ones who married, so maybe he’s about to meet Mrs. Uris or Mrs. Denbrough. He kind of hopes it’s Stan’s wife. Nothing against Bill’s wife, but he heard that she’s an actual movie star and Eddie has no idea what to do with that.

But who he really wants to visit him is Richie.

Obviously. It was like that when he was a kid too—maybe not early on but certainly later, when he started thinking _I’ll walk down to the Barrens, see if Bill or Stan is there, but man I hope Richie’s free._ And if he was, Eddie would try to hide how happy he was, how relieved he was, by packing all that delight down tight and then waiting for Richie to say something, and then just _exploding_ at him. And Richie always looked pretty thrilled about it too, dumb grin getting wider, mouth getting smarter.

Eddie was friends with Bill because how could he not be friends with Big Bill Denbrough, who had the best games and the fastest bike and the kind of magnetic charisma that made Eddie want to run after him. The games they played involved running—sprinting—or walking for a long time, eating up the ground with their feet, or hiking up a snow-slick hill on hands and knees and pretending at being mountain climbers. Bill adventured, Bill traveled, and Eddie followed in his wake and was glad to do it.

And Stan was mostly still. He watched, he waited, he collected. He stared out into the distance as though at something none of them could see. Eddie would tilt his head and try to do it and sometimes he imagined he could see it, the world rushing up with all its information at Stan, everything open to his perusal. You could never hide anything from Stan, was the thing, and even when you thought you were being honest sometimes he’d look at you with a cutting stare as if he knew there was more, and sometimes he’d just shrug and smirk a little and let it go, but in a way that made Eddie almost feral with rage— _what do you know?_ But Stan, aside from being Jewish, could almost always get Eddie out of the house when his mother came to the door, asking if Eddie could come over to work on a puzzle with him, or to help him with a school project, or to put together a model—and then they’d go play outside just like they had always intended. Stan could lie cold-blooded to Sonia Kasbrak like butter wouldn’t melt.

So Bill ran out ahead and Stan was still. But Richie would pop up out of nowhere and fucking tackle Eddie. And Eddie hit the dirt and shouted, _Richie! Stop—knocking me over!_ But the outward annoyance hid some deep satisfaction. And Richie would pick him up and stand him on his feet and make a show of dusting him off and play the English butler.

All of this is to say that Eddie is ready for his first visiting hours once his morphine is down. He’s been awake for a little bit, he’s done his breathing exercises, and he stumbled around the room with Tracy, and when she asks him if he’d like to see his visitors he answers yes so fast she doesn’t even get all the words out. He apologizes. She just smiles and reminds him that he can have up to two visitors at a time and that she’ll be back in an hour to do breathing and coughing exercises with him.

So Eddie is… not exactly disappointed to see Bev. But he’s definitely surprised.

“I know,” Bev says, coming in and making room in the doorway for Ben. “How are you feeling?”

“I’ve been impaled,” Eddie replies seriously.

She bends to hug him as best she can while he’s sitting up in the hospital bed. Her cheek presses to his, and he raises his arm as best he can.

“Nice beard,” she says when she straightens up, smiling.

Eddie groans. “I know.” Tracy offered to shave it for him, and assured him that she shaved her own head regularly. But with the wound in his cheek, he’s still too jumpy to let anyone near his face with a blade.

Ben reaches out and clasps Eddie’s hand, and Eddie squeezes back as best he can. Sometimes he can tell why the doctors are worried about the nerves in his right arm. His fingers are thick and clumsy in a way they’re not usually.

“I hear you gave me blood,” he says to Bev.

She sits down heavily in one of the plastic chairs and leans back. She looks… tired, but also relaxed in a way she didn’t, even when they were all back at the restaurant. There was something about her that seemed brittle, even when Stanley staggered in half an hour late and she got up and threw her arms around him. Some of that brittleness has faded now. Eddie supposes that, like him, she’s realized what she can live through.

“Yeah, me and Richie,” she says.

Ben says, “We all tested, except for Stan, but they were the only ones compatible. I’m sorry.”

Eddie has to focus pretty hard on how Ben is apologizing for his blood type right now because if he doesn’t, he’s going to think about Richie’s blood going around in his veins and his heart monitor is going to do something to embarrass him.

“Is Stan okay?” he asks.

“He got an infection,” Ben says.

“His wife came up to meet him. He’s fine now. She’s really sweet.” Bev tugs on the hem of Ben’s shirt so that he sits in the chair next to hers instead of hovering there awkwardly. “She won’t swear. Or, she starts to and then she catches herself and says the name of a cookie instead.”

Eddie stares at her, nonplussed.

“Apparently she teaches elementary school,” Bev says.

Eddie looks down to Bev’s hand, which is still on Ben’s thigh. He looks back up at her, and then to Ben, whose blush is growing deeper the longer Eddie just looks at them.

“So is this happening?” Eddie asks dryly.

Bev grins. “Not that I haven’t been dedicating every waking moment to your recovery—“

Eddie blows a raspberry at her and then relaxes down against his pillows. As Bev laughs he observes, “Someone should be having a good time.”

Ben says loudly, “So what did the doctor say, Eddie?”

“I have a tube in my armpit,” Eddie offers. “And I can go home once they’re satisfied my lung isn’t leaking.”

Ben blanches a little bit.

“Can you walk?” Bev asks.

“Yeah, they get me up every two hours to do laps,” Eddie says. “Got to prevent blood clots. My hands are so cold, can you…?”

“I got it,” Ben says, and takes Eddie’s left hand and rubs it between both of his. The friction helps. He moves on to the other.

Into the silence of Ben rubbing Eddie’s hands, Bev says, “What else do you need, Eddie?”

There are a lot of possible responses Eddie could give to that, ranging from _a twelve-pack of Sprite_ to _for someone to tell me what the fuck happened with the demon and the dead body we left in the library_ to _a working cell phone_.

And Eddie is just ravenous. Eating through needles. Starved of information. Body numbed by drugs but waking up slowly and telling him about the things he wants, the things he needs, after decades of having every impulse carefully regulated, every input measured and every output clockwork smooth. He’s an automaton come to life. He’s Pinocchio who got his wish. Being a real boy hurts a lot more than he expected.

Against the white hospital wall, Bev’s hair warps as though distorted by heat waves. Eddie’s perception trying to make sense of something so bright after the bland inoffensive blankness of the hospital room.

“Did we do it?” he asks her, watching her face carefully. If she lied to him, he thinks he’d be able to tell. “Did we get It? Did we win?”

Bev blinks once, so beautiful Eddie feels like his safety rail ought to be a velvet rope between the two of them. She belongs in a museum. How did somebody like Bev Marsh ever come out of a place like Derry?

“Yes,” she says, her voice surprisingly sweet and hushed. “Yes, we did. You got It.”

Knots come untied in his body all at once, his whole spine slackening.

“Oh God, Eddie, we didn’t realize you didn’t know,” Bev sighs.

Eddie looks at her blankly. “How would I know?” It’s not even an accusation. As Bev and Ben exchange guilty looks, Eddie asks, “What about—the, the thing. In the library.” _The body. What happened to the body? Tell me that we’re safe and nobody’s going to jail._

Bev’s face doesn’t change but Ben’s does, his eyes widening just slightly as if to tell Eddie to be careful. Which Eddie is. That’s why he’s being vague and saying _the thing_ and not _the axe-murder_ , _did we get It_ and not _did we kill that fucking clown_.

“Yes,” Ben says, his voice just as soft as Bev’s. “Yes, we took care of it.”

A little pulse of stress goes through Eddie. A shadow of the same way that he felt walking into the library and figuring out that Bowers had attacked Mike too but Richie had killed him. It’s not that Eddie wants to be taken care of, because he doesn’t. He emphatically doesn’t. But it’s also nice, in a way, to know that things are settled.

“And Stan’s okay?” he checks again. If Stan survives the clown only to die of sepsis Eddie’s going to have to fight God with his bare hands or something. It’s enough crushing unfairness in an already-pretty-indifferent life.

“Stan’s okay,” Bev confirms.

Mike was also injured. “And Mike’s okay?” Bowers cut him and Ben bandaged him up and Stan watched and paled because Mike’s wound was also on his forearm, and Eddie watched him carefully to see if his blood pressure was just going to tank.

“Yes, Mike’s okay.”

“Did Mike get his—” He motions toward his own wrist, where the IV rests in his forearm. Eddie’s fully willing to admit that most of his life has been dedicated to unreasonable caution—but his job also counts on him knowing what is reasonable. He’s anxious, he’s not deranged. Mike walked through a sewer with an open wound just like Eddie and Stan.

“Yes, he did,” Bev says. “That’s fine too. I think they gave him something to take care of it.”

Okay. Eddie lets his hands rest on the waffle blanket, right palm turned up so that the IV tube doesn’t snag. He takes some breaths, feeling the slow stretch of his broken ribs. It’s like pushing a bruise; he can’t help doing it.

What does he need?

“Can I see Richie?” he asks without looking up. He kind of instinctively wants to check for their reactions—are they offended? Are they suspicious?—but it’s better for his peace of mind if he doesn’t. They asked him what he needed.

Bev hesitates.

That gets Eddie to look up. Anger spikes up out of nowhere, but it’s driven by fear. “Did he leave?” he demands.

“Not by choice,” Ben says quickly.

Eddie’s brain immediately clicks back to the murder. Was Richie dragged back to Derry in handcuffs? Ben said it was taken care of, what the fuck—?

“He just went back to the hotel,” Ben says.

Eddie is still stuck in _Richie is in Derry_ mode, flatly uncomprehending.

“Look, he hadn’t slept in a couple days, and he was still pretty beat-up from—you know,” Ben says, trying to skirt around _our trip through Derry’s sewage system_ in case anyone in the hospital overhears. “And we thought it might stress you out if the next time you saw him he was still wearing scrubs and a biohazard, and honestly we didn’t know whether they’d let him into the ICU like that.”

“What Ben means to say,” Bev says, “is that he and Mike threatened Richie into a shower, and then Richie was so exhausted he fell asleep, and we’re still waiting for him to wake up, realize that it’s visiting hours, and storm the hospital.”

Eddie has the cognitive dissonance of imagining thirteen-year-old Richie trying to storm anything—uh, no—and then remembers that Richie is not just an adult but a goddamn huge adult with the ability to make himself other people’s problem. So maybe.

“Oh,” he says, because he’s not sure what kind of response is appropriate there. Inexplicably he feels a little embarrassed for asking, and then wants to kick himself. There is nothing more conspicuous about asking for Richie when he’s in a hospital bed than there is in asking for any one of them, because _he’s in a hospital bed_ , and even if there were—well, fuck conspicuous. He’s exhausted of worrying about other people’s perception, of moving through his life like a ballerina on eggshells as if that’ll stop people from making assumptions about his health or his—

 _Sex life_ , he tells himself flatly, and feels himself color immediately. _You were afraid people were going to make assumptions about your sex life. No point in being squeamish about it now._ The bluntness of his inner thoughts is unfamiliar. It doesn’t even sound like him all the way.

Well, Eddie can barely move. Nobody’s going to assume he’s asking for Richie so they can—and here his train of thought takes on a very Richie tone— _fuck in this hospital bed._ His blush deepens. There’s a safety rail. Eddie barely fits in here by himself, and Richie—

“I’m still a little high,” he says without looking up, because it’s the only way he can credit this frankly ridiculous train of thought. He has to blame it on the drugs.

“That’s fine, honey,” Bev says, but there’s no laugh in her voice, just a tender concern. Maybe Eddie’s blood levels haven’t replenished enough to make his blush conspicuous. He hopes so.

Richie would laugh at him, Eddie thinks, and his chest tightens in a way that’s not the pain of broken ribs or the constriction of an asthma attack. It’s—something like loss. Like the fear he felt when he thought Stan wasn’t coming to the restaurant at all.

He wants Richie, is all. Overlarge and casual in one of the cheap plastic chairs, loud and inappropriate and eating up the silence and the hours and distracting Eddie from the room around him.

“We can call him,” Ben says, helpfully pointing out the blindingly obvious.

“No,” Eddie says quickly. “No, let him sleep.”

Eddie said _I love you_ and Richie laughed and asked if he was high. But Richie called him _sweetheart_ when he did it, so. And maybe a hospital room isn’t the right setting for that kind of thing, maybe Eddie’s just going to have to wait for… for something. A moment. The ability to stand up on his own again. He doesn’t know.

“Can I see Stan?” he asks.

“Of course,” Bev says. “Do you want one of us to stay, or do you want to meet Patty, or do you just want to talk to him one-on-one?”

Eddie’s grateful for her laying out his options like that. He feels like his brain is struggling to build a roadmap.

“I’ll meet Patty,” he says.

* * *

All in all, Patty Blum Uris seems to be doing a great job adjusting to the existential horror that is her husband’s suicide attempt, subsequent escape from psychiatric care, flight to Maine, reunion with his childhood friends, and immediate re-hospitalization. That is: she’s still standing up, smiling, and making conversation, which is more than Eddie expected of any outsiders to the situation.

At first Eddie watches Stan carefully when Patty speaks. He doesn’t know what he’s looking for—some kind of guide to how Eddie should interact with the real world for the rest of his life, maybe?—but it becomes clear that Stan loves his wife.

Stan _loves_ his wife. There’s a little smirk in the corner of his mouth when he says, “Eddie, this is my wife, Patricia.”

She immediately says, “Patty,” and leans over to carefully shake his hand, more squeezing it than anything else. “Do you prefer Eddie?”

“Yeah,” Eddie says.

Patty sits down in the other chair and laces her arm through Stan’s. They sit shoulder-to-shoulder—Stan, almost as reserved about touch as a child as Eddie was—and Stan’s smirk turns soft as Patty’s brow furrows. “I only ask because, uh, there’s someone here everyone keeps calling Trashmouth—”

This startles Eddie into a sharp jerk of laughter that really does hurt his chest, and Patty Uris begins apologizing.

Stan looks just as tired as Beverly. If Bev showed up to the Jade of the Orient looking brittle and shaken, Stan arrived looking fragile and drawn and sick. He still looks a little bit shaky, maybe, but the way he leans on his wife is… nice. Certainly nothing Eddie would think to do with Myra. She’s never been able to comfort Eddie just by pushing her shoulder into his.

It confirms something in the back of Eddie’s mind. Some sort of _it’s not marriage, it’s just me_ question he didn’t know he was still wondering about. Some small issues settling as he understands better, though he couldn’t put it into words if he tried.

“Did you save my life?” he asks Stan, because that seems to be the most pertinent one.

Inexplicably Patty turns bright pink. It throws into relief how pale Stan still is, next to her. Patty is healthy and alive, and Stan’s still a little bit wan.

“I mean, I helped do CPR,” he says. “I breathed for you.”

“My lung popped,” Eddie says, in case Stan doesn’t know.

Stan almost smiles. “Yeah, but that wasn’t my fault.”

“I never said it was.”

“But.” Stan shrugs a little. “Trashmouth—” Patty looks around, apparently just as perplexed. “—doesn’t know how to apply pressure to a wound, so maybe a little bit.”

“A little bit?”

Stan nods.

Eddie smiles. “You saved my life a little bit?”

“Like, a percentage,” Stan replies.

“A percentage of my life?”

Stan’s smiling back now. “Yeah, a percentage.”

“I think the two of us can work that out together,” Eddie says. “Mathematically.”

“That’s right, what’s your job? Risk analyst?”

And Stan’s an accountant. They ought to be able to calculate, between the two of them, exactly what portion of Eddie’s life was saved by Stan, and what portion by Richie, and what portion by Derry Home Hospital, and what portion by Sovereign Light. The idea is oddly comforting. Stan’s hair has darkened a lot now he’s older, but Eddie can still remember sunlit afternoons in the Urises’ living room, him and Stan and Ben all putting together a LEGO kit to rigid specification.

“For now,” Eddie says. He’s been hospitalized with no word to work for a while; he might be fired by the time he gets back. There ought to be a swooping sensation of anxiety about that, but there isn’t, and he can’t decide whether he’s buoyed by the morphine or by that feeling of being not-bad that came over him in the cavern. He lets his head loll back on the pillow and asks, “What’s Georgia like?”

“But Stanley said you were in New York!” Patty bursts out, apparently very excited by this. She only calls Stan Stanley. Eddie wonders if she’s heard anyone call him Stan-the-Man in front of her, or if Richie has already warped her married name into _Urine_ in front of her. “How long were you there?”

Eddie sighs a little. “Moved there when I was a teenager,” he replies. “It was…” He grins suddenly. “I hated it.”

“We were there in college!” Patty says, which Eddie realizes slowly is the point she finds interesting. “We met in New York, and we got married there. What if we’d met? What if we ran across each other in… I don’t know, a deli or something?”

Eddie knows too many health inspectors to dine out in New York with any regularity, and has too many dietary restrictions—or rather, has needlessly restricted his own diet for so many years that he hasn’t actually enjoyed food in…

Actually, no. Eddie can’t remember the last time he enjoyed food.

“You eat at a lot of delis?”

“Not in Georgia,” Stan replies dryly.

“There are some,” Patty says.

“Yeah, but not like we ate in college.”

“You ate in college,” Patty replies, a faintly sulky tone to her voice that makes Stan smile. “I was at least five-percent bagel in college.”

“Everyone is five-percent bagel in college.”

“I have definitely never been any percentage bagel,” Eddie replies.

“Have you eaten a bagel in your life?”

“Yes.”

“Then at some point, you have been a percentage bagel. It might be—no, listen—it might have been a fraction of a percentage, but you were definitely some percent bagel.”

“No, no, no,” Patty says. “You can’t argue that the moment you consume the bagel it becomes a part of you. It’s not like uranium—there’s no half-life to bagels.”

Stan looks to her. “I mean, I’m not saying that he’s still part bagel.”

“No, but like, this is totally dependent on whether we accept ‘you are what you eat’ as true.”

At this point Eddie remembers that, before Stan showed up at the restaurant, Richie declared that Stan was a pussy. For several moments his attempts to stifle his giggling make Patty and Stan assume he’s having some kind of medical incident, until they just realize that he’s laughing over something that--as far as they know—isn’t that funny. Richie would make the joke out loud. Eddie’s just laughing over the idea of what Stan’s face would do and how horrified Patty Uris, elementary school teacher, might be. If it were just Stan he might make the joke, but the idea that anyone he doesn’t know might make any assumptions about his own sex life was so horrifying just a few minutes ago that he can’t say anything like that to Patty, it would just be unacceptable. And rude.

Richie would definitely make the joke, though.

Why does he miss Richie over something so stupid?

Well, maybe because he’s been quietly missing him for thirty years, but whatever.

Over the course of the conversation, Eddie learns that Stan and Patty have a house just outside Atlanta. Stan has his own practice, which is doing pretty well. No one speaks of any of the effects that extended unplanned time off work has on a career, but if Stan is his own boss, Eddie’s a bit less concerned for him than he is for himself.

“Do you and your wife have any kids?” Patty asks Eddie.

“No,” Eddie says quickly. “No, thank god.”

Patty’s eyebrows climb. “You don’t want them?”

“I—”

Eddie doesn’t know what to say to that. Myra hasn’t been on birth control for years, and her doctors made some noises about her weight affecting her fertility, but her doctors always attribute her problems to her weight. But if Eddie thinks about it, thinks about having kids with or without Myra, he doesn’t know if he wants them. He doesn’t know what he’d do with a child, to be honest—doesn’t know the kind of parent he’d be, and is a little afraid to find out.

“I don’t know if I want kids,” he says, trying to be honest. “I don’t think… Myra and I would be great parents.” Regardless of their respective parenting skills, as a team they would… they would not be great. It would be irresponsible of Eddie to inflict that on a child. Part of Eddie wants to add _I’m going to ask for a divorce,_ but he doesn’t think he can say that out loud to Stan’s wife before he says it to his own.

And that’s something he’s going to have to do, now that the clown is dead and Bowers is… taken care of, whatever that means. Besides the obvious, which is that Richie took care of it, but Ben said _we took care of it_ , and Eddie isn’t sure who _we_ is, but he knows that they’re protecting him and Richie and Mike. He’s going to have to ask for more detail when he’s assured that they won’t be overheard.

Eddie’s going to have to get on with the rest of his life. Which he thought he was doing, just by going out and living it and picking up the phone and saying _Edward Kaspbrak speaking_ and by going to work every day and by speaking to Myra and by getting paid and buying groceries and paying bills. But he wasn’t, because he’s slowly understanding that he wasn’t really himself, after all these years, except in the ways that he doesn’t like. He’s sunk four decades of effort into… (and here the risk analyst portion of his brain is clicking online, trying to be heard over the morphine haze and the cavern-calm) the idea that he’s already started dating Myra and it’s what people expect so he might as well marry her, the idea that they’re not getting any younger and they’re already married so they might as well have children.

Eddie has arrived where his sunk-cost fallacy and his bygones principle intersect, and he can see it now. He’s a man who bought a ticket to a baseball game but now doesn’t want to go. He can go and be miserable, or he can waste the money but spend his time doing something he’ll like better.

Stan is an accountant.

“You know the sunk-cost fallacy?” Eddie asks him out loud.

Stan nods, apparently tracking the leap in conversation without issue. Patty’s brow furrows but she says nothing. To her, Stan says, “The idea that you’ve already invested time and money and effort into something, so you should keep investing.”

“I knew the gist, but that helps,” Patty says. “Throwing good money after bad.”

“Exactly.”

“Fourth-graders don’t really get into logical fallacies by name that way,” she says dryly.

“You do a lot of business like that?” Stan asks Eddie.

“Yeah.” _Edward, what’s the risk of this promotion? What does our profit and loss statement look like? Is this a solid investment considering—_ But Eddie’s already thinking about the next steps after a sunk-cost fallacy, which is the idea that when the plan is already failing, you just have to keep going. That’s his marriage. He knew going in—he didn’t know, but he knew, in some way—that it was a bad idea, and yet he’s an aircraft pilot who knows the disaster is going to be fatal, but goddamnit he’s going to stick with the plan because it’s the only thing he has the nerve to do.

Well. Say you’ve bought the ticket to the baseball game. Maybe you’ll go on the off-chance that you might enjoy yourself, even though you’re reluctant about going. Eddie has had a number of social engagements turn out that way, especially when the alternative is staying at home. If you don’t have anything better to do with your time, maybe you’ll go to the baseball game. When the choice is between that and wasting the money with no guarantee that anything better is available, maybe that’s how the fallacy gets you.

Down the hallway he hears footsteps and he knows, without knowing how he knows, who they belong to.

A lot of Eddie’s success as a risk analyst is his ability to ignore the way that the investors settle on optimism. They don’t want to admit failure. They don’t want to think for themselves and voice the misgivings that they’re all feeling. They need Eddie to come in and be the realist and show them the numbers and what is and isn’t true and what the best and worst possible outcomes are.

One of the side effects of morphine--though, admittedly, the incidence is not known, is the false or unusual sense of well-being. But in all honesty Eddie has been riding this train since he started bleeding out, so he can’t chalk that up to the morphine; it’s going to be the exsanguination, and maybe a little bit of the new lease on life, and maybe a little bit of the conviction that something better has just walked back into his life.

Walked back into his hospital room with a new leather jacket and a Styrofoam cup of coffee and a scowl and perpetual stubble and smudged glasses and a declaration of “Fucking hate all of you—not you, Patty, you’re an angel and we’re happy you’re here—are there Jewish angels?—and not you, Eddie, though if they’d told me you were awake—”

“Hi, Richie,” Eddie says.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Points to anyone who can guess who Dr. LaCroix was inspired by. Somebody already caught my Bucky Barnes cameo from Beverly Leaves, so I need new secret cameos.
> 
> UPDATE:
> 
> [Richie administers forehead kiss](https://twitter.com/cytakigawa/status/1248911370340442112) by [@cytakigawa](https://twitter.com/cytakigawa) on Twitter.


	2. Control Your Husband

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Losers make flight plans. Richie antagonizes. Eddie plans for contingencies.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Y'all want 30 pages of conversations? Because I sure do.
> 
> Content warnings: Richie is an asshole. Richie implies that Mike spiked his drink (he didn't). Brief discussion of racism and microaggressions. Continued medical inaccuracies--but really, if someone is coughing, do not perform the Heimlich maneuver on them. Continued mention of canonical injuries--Eddie's face, Mike's arm. Mention of canon-typical racism. Mention of canonical death of a child (Georgie, Drew). Implied dependence on medication (Eddie).

“Hello, Eddie my love,” Richie says casually, and puts a hand on the doorway. He leans down and stares at Stan pointedly, as Eddie tries to work out whether his face is actually burning or whether his recent blood loss prevents him from blushing properly. “And you, Stan, you can go fuck yourself, same as the rest of those Losers out there. Nothing personal, Mrs. Uris.”

Stan blandly holds up his left hand. “I’m married, Trashmouth, I don’t have to fuck myself.”

Richie snorts and Patty snaps, “I don’t like that, Stanley.”

Stanley turns to her and picks up her hand. He kisses her knuckles. “Sorry, babylove.”

 _“Babylove,”_ Richie repeats.

There are two pink flags standing out on Patty’s cheeks. Eddie feels bad for her.

“You can tell him to go fuck himself, if you want, Patty,” Eddie suggests. “Everyone does.”

“Everyone does,” Richie agrees. “I won’t be offended. It would make you part of the club. You can have one for free, go on.”

Without looking up from his wife’s hand, Stan says, “Richie, you leave her alone.”

“I don’t have a problem with her,” Richie says. He puts his back to the doorframe and sips his coffee, staring straight across the room out the window. “But there are two visitors allowed in this hospital room, and I’m not leaving.”

“I’ll go,” Patty says.

“No,” Richie says, “I’m not kicking you out, you can sit here with me until five PM, I’ll tell you every embarrassing thing Stan ever did, but you—” He points at Stan.

“Richie,” Eddie says.

Richie lets his free hand fall and looks at Eddie. There’s something sentry-like about him. Eddie’s almost distracted by the blue tinge under his eyelids; Bev said that he was so tired he fell asleep back at the hotel, but he doesn’t look like he’s slept at all.

Richie and Stan got vicious sometimes, when they were kids. They were best friends—Eddie always knew that Stan belonged to Richie, somehow, something that Eddie didn’t quite understand. Richie was an unstoppable force and Stan was an immovable object, and sometimes they would just shout at each other until Bill intervened or until Eddie interrupted and drew Richie’s attention away. Stan always took what Richie said personally, even if Richie was talking out his ass—and he usually was. And Richie could never stand being ignored, and Stan was great at ignoring him when he was annoying.

But Richie’s angry—like, really angry, in a way that Eddie can’t remember seeing on Richie except for one time, in the dark, when Richie was listing off everything Bill had done to wrong him as if he was just about to leave Bill there in Its clutches. And Patty is uncomfortable, and Stan is cold because that’s how he is when people throw tantrums, and Eddie is trapped in a hospital bed. He’s very aware of his own helplessness, that if Stan were to stand up and turn toward Richie there would be nothing Eddie could do to get between them.

Eddie looks at the angry set of Richie’s shoulders under the new leather jacket, the tension of his knuckles on the Styrofoam cup with its black plastic lid.

“Give me your coffee,” Eddie says.

Everyone stops and looks at him.

“What?” Richie says.

“Your coffee,” Eddie says, and holds out his left hand on the safety rail. “Give me it.”

There is silence and then Richie laughs. “Can you even have coffee?”

“Eddie, I really don’t think,” Patty begins, and then falls silent as Richie crosses the hospital room.

He puts the cup in Eddie’s hand. “Got it?”

Eddie hooks his pinkie under the bottom of the cup to steady it, wrapped around it with his other three fingers and thumb. “Yeah.”

Richie releases the cup and takes a step back. “It’s black,” he warns.

Eddie, despite living in Manhattan for basically the entirety of his adult life, has never been allowed to drink coffee. His mother certainly never allowed it when he was living in her house, and he and Myra never owned a coffeemaker. Sometimes he snuck it at work, but he was never good at brewing it in the office machine, and even when he bought them from coffeeshops he never managed to acquire the taste for it.

He considers the cup greedily. There’s a faint impression of moisture around the hole in the lid. Not wet enough to be the coffee itself. It’s a print from Richie’s mouth. If he were a woman it might be lipstick.

“Also it’s from the hospital cafeteria so it’s dogshit,” Richie adds. He digs his hand into his pocket and holds up a red bag of Skittles. “You want these, too?”

“Maybe,” Eddie replies. He sips the coffee and burns his lip immediately. The little wash of liquid that makes it into his mouth is bitter and scalding and he hates it. He swallows it and the heat flows all the way down his throat.

Richie starts laughing. “Didn’t like that?”

“Fuck you,” Eddie says immediately, and then adds, “Sorry, Patty.” He holds the coffee back out to Richie. “Take this back.”

Richie obliges. He grabs the coffee cup by the lid, all five fingers splayed carefully around the circumference, and lifts it casually out of Eddie’s hand. “You want the Skittles?”

A sip of coffee is different; Eddie doesn’t know if he’ll be able to stop once he starts eating Skittles. And he’s been allowed to have one Sprite, after he fainted, but he’s still getting most of his nutrition through his IV. Sarah the nurse has suggested that he’ll be graduated up to Jell-O soon.

“You want to watch me eat the Skittles?”

“Yeah, there’s no TV in here.”

“I can do David Attenborough. Patty, do you want any Skittles?”

“I’m okay, thank you,” Patty says primly. She stands. “I’ll just let you all—”

“No,” Richie says, “I don’t want to drive you out.”

“Oh for—pete’s sake,” Stan says, glancing up. “Eddie, would you rather have Richie here looking like a zombie, still covered in blood and sewage, and wearing scrubs; or is it better that he’s taken a shower, changed his clothes like a grown-up, and had at least one nap?”

“Patricia, control your husband.”

“Richie,” Eddie says.

Richie peers at Eddie over his glasses and blinks at him once, dryly.

“Sit down.”

“Do you want me to leave?” Stan asks politely.

“I want both of you to shut up,” Eddie replies. “Patty’s my favorite now.”

“And after I gave you my coffee.”

“Yeah, well, it was dogshit.”

Richie sits down in Patty’s abandoned chair, faintly smirking.

Stan gets up immediately and sighs. “We’ll see you later, Eddie.”

The look that Eddie gives Patty says, on both sides, _Sorry about him_. And then Eddie’s alone in the hospital room with Richie.

Again.

Richie opens up the bag of Skittles.

“Time is it?” Eddie asks, some of his energy gone out of him now.

“Just after nine,” Richie replies. He picks one of the Skittles out of the bag with his thumb and index finger and pops it into his mouth casually. He holds the coffee cup pinched between his knees. “Still bright and early. I would have been here when visiting hours started, but there’s a conspiracy, and I’m pretty sure that Mike slipped something in my drink. Bill says Mike did that, so he knows how.”

Eddie rolls his eyes. “I don’t know what kind of exciting things you think I get up to here.”

“Eh, you’re a dark horse.” Richie picks up his coffee cup in his free hand and swings his legs so that his feet are in the empty chair, his knees hooked over the metal armrest. It doesn’t look even a little bit comfortable. Then he takes a sip of his coffee and makes a face.

“Do you even like black coffee?”

“It ain’t about the taste, Eds.”

“Do not—” Eddie interrupts himself by laughing. There's no reason for that old call-and-response anymore. He's done pretending. Alarmed, Richie looks over at him. Eddie puts a hand to his chest and grimaces, but it doesn’t hurt that much while the laugh’s in him.

“What?” Richie asks, and when Eddie makes eye contact with him there’s such a transparent look of concern on his face that Eddie realizes he’s not asking why Eddie’s laughing, he’s worried.

“I’m fine,” Eddie says. He realizes he’s bracing himself on the wrong side for his surgical incisions, so it must be his ribs. “I got broken ribs.”

Richie’s expression doesn’t change for a long moment. Then he leans down, all long arms, to set his coffee down on the floor, and puts both hands over his mouth.

“Are you going to throw up?” Eddie asks.

Richie shakes his head.

Eddie watches him for long moments and then asks, “Are you going to cry?”

“No,” Richie says, definitely choked up. He blinks hard and then wipes the elbow of his sleeve across his eyes—there’s a screech from the leather—and lifts his head. “How do you feel?”

“Not bad.”

“You fucking psycho.”

Eddie smiles a little. “I don’t. Feel bad.”

“Yeah, well, I’ll have what you’re having.”

“They overdosed me.”

“Did they?”

“Yeah, I passed out and woke up and a Trinidadian doctor was asking me if that was my first seizure.”

Richie stares at him. “Holy shit, Eds.”

“I didn’t actually have a seizure.”

“Well, he’s a doctor, I would fucking hope he’d be able to tell the difference.”

“Yeah, he talked to me after and he said I was too coherent to have had a seizure.”

“You’ve never been coherent a day in your life.”

“Eat shit.”

Richie leans down and picks up his coffee again. “I’m drinking it.” He takes a pointed swig.

Eddie’s eyes drop to Richie’s throat and then back up to his face. “Anyway, I asked him where he was from because I thought you’d like his accent.”

“His Trinidadian accent?”

“Yeah.”

Richie swings his legs down again, braces his elbows on his knees, and leans forward. “I don’t know what a Trinidadian accent sounds like.” He stares at Eddie expectantly.

Eddie stares back at him before realizing what he wants. “No.”

“Come on.”

“No.”

“Come _on_.”

“No. This is why you’re one of the most offensive comedians in America. That would be super fucking racist of me.”

“How is it any less racist for me to do it?”

“I’m hoping you’ll do some goddamn research. I know for a fact you’ve done voicework.”

Richie’s eyebrows shoot up. “Oh do you?”

Eddie… might have done some frantic Googling while he was waiting at his gate at the airport. Right around the time he remembered that Richie Tozier existed, and something about a pair of shoes.

“And you knew I don’t write my own material.”

“And thank fucking god, I don’t think I could speak to you again.”

“How much of my stuff have you seen?”

Eddie squints at him.

“Oh my god, are you a fan?”

Eddie knows this game, and if it means that Richie’s going to stop sulking, he’ll play along. “No.”

“You totally are,” Richie says triumphantly. “Do you have a shrine to me in your closet at home? Like, little pictures of my face cut out and stuck on the wall?”

If Eddie were a little bolder he’d say _well since you mentioned closets_ and come out right there, but he’s afraid to watch Richie regress into that teary-eyed shell again, or the puffed-up anger at Stan. He doesn’t quite know what’s going on with Richie, and while Richie’s apparently willing to hand things to Eddie while he’s in the hospital bed, Eddie doesn’t feel great about prodding at him from a distance.

Also, he kind of wants the comfort of the bickering. The assurance that nothing has changed, after all these years.

“If I were gonna have a shrine, I’d pick a good comedian.”

“Name one good comedian that you even know,” Richie says.

Eddie looks at him incredulously. “John Mulaney.”

“That’s fair,” Richie allows. “Name a second good comedian that you even know.”

“We’re not doing this.”

Richie grins.

Eddie considers and says, “I told Dr. LaCroix that you wanted to be a ventriloquist and he asked me if you were like Jeff Dunham.”

Richie picks up on completely the wrong part of that sentence. “His name is Dr. _LaCroix_?”

Eddie frowns at him, confused. “Yeah?” It’s a real name. It’s French, Eddie’s pretty sure. Means _the cross_.

“Like the seltzer?” Richie asks. “Is he lightly strawberry-flavored?”

“What?”

“LaCroix is this brand of seltzer. They say they’re fruit-flavored, but it kind of tastes like someone—” He glances down at the bag on his lap. “—dissolved maybe one Skittle in a keg of fart water.”

At the words “fart water” Eddie snorts so hard he starts coughing, and that really does hurt. He grits his teeth against it and everything, bracing his ribs with the knuckles of his left hand and grimacing as Richie asks, “Can you breathe? Do you need me to call a nurse?” He shakes his head and tries to hold his breath to steady his spasming diaphragm.

“Hey, dumbass,” Eddie manages, his voice breaking in the middle of the endearment. “If someone can breathe enough to cough, that means there’s air coming in and out. It’s why you don’t do the Heimlich on someone’s coughing.”

“Yeah, because I was getting ready to do the Heimlich on you.” Richie rolls his eyes and leans back in his chair, apparently relieved. He eyes Eddie contemplatively. “How many broken ribs?”

Eddie wants to shrug, but his shoulders tell him that’s a bad idea. He tilts his head instead. “I don’t know. If they told me, I forgot.”

“What, like, all of them?”

“I’m pretty sure that’s another thing,” Eddie says.

“What?”

“Like, when you break off a piece of your whole ribcage—I think that’s called a flail chest. Like, when all your ribs are—” Richie covers his mouth with his hand again and Eddie changes tactics: “Don’t you dare throw up.”

“I’m not, I’m not,” Richie says, very unconvincingly. He swallows several times—the little click of it is audible in the room—and then lowers his hand. “Do you—do you have that?”

“Vomiting?” So far, no, and Eddie’s grateful for it. He doesn’t want to feel what those convulsions of his stomach might do to his already-hurt torso.

“Your floating ribs.”

“Floating ribs are something else. Everyone has floating ribs, they’re just ribs that don’t attach in front.”

“You know, for someone who thinks he’s allergic to cashews, you’re spouting off an awful lot of medical bullshit.”

Eddie gives him his best _you moron_ look. “We were in health class together, Richie. Floating ribs are a thing.”

Richie shrugs at him. “It was public school in Maine. I got kicked out for making condom balloons.”

“We definitely did not cover safe sex and the skeletal system in the same class—”

“Clearly you have been having sex wrong this entire time, it's called _boning,_ Eddie—”

“I mean, obviously—”

“Oh wait, I’m sorry, I forgot you’re a forty-year-old virgin—”

“Jesus Christ,” Eddie says.

To be fair, Eddie is reasonably certain that he has been having sex wrong this entire time. As in, with a woman. When he has had sex, that is, which hasn’t been for a long time and honestly that’s the way he prefers it. At the moment—he is vaguely sure he’d like to try having sex again at some point in the future, but all the parts of his nervous system that might influence that are offline, and Eddie is a little relieved by that too. He’s not too happy that he can feel his burnt lip; he doesn’t want to have to worry about getting a boner in his hospital bed.

Richie leans back in his chair again, apparently letting that particular bit go. He hasn’t actually apologized for not being here when visiting hours opened, but he definitely walked in like he was ready to fight everyone between him and Eddie’s hospital room, so Eddie knows he’s pissed about it. If Eddie wanted an apology he’s sure that Richie would give it, just like he gave Eddie his coffee.

Myra would make him spell out the apology, if she were in the hospital and Eddie were late. Come to think of it, Myra will probably make Eddie grovel by the time he finally gets around to contacting her.

He doesn’t want to grovel. He’ll apologize for leaving her in the dark for—however long it takes him to work up the nerve to call her and tell her what the fuck is happening. But he doesn’t want to grovel and abase himself, and he doesn’t want Richie’s apologies.

“Missed you,” Eddie says.

Richie’s eyebrows lift like he’s surprised. “Yeah?”

Eddie gives him an incredulous look. “Yeah.”

Richie looks bemused, eyebrows climbing higher and his lips pursing. “How’s the hospital?”

“Sucks,” Eddie replies.

“Yeah? No hot nurses?”

“Yeah, Richie, that’s the problem, there are no hot nurses, that’s my priority—I have a fucking hole through my chest and my ass is hanging out all the time, but the lack of opportunity to objectify—”

Richie interrupts him by laughing loudly and letting his head loll back against the wall. Once he quiets he adds, “Yeah, I missed you too, buddy.”

“You gotta fire your ghostwriter, you’re lazy now.”

Richie gives him the same kind of incredulous look that Eddie just gave him. “I was always lazy.”

“No you weren’t.” And he wasn’t. Richie was class valedictorian, could have skipped a grade in math if he’d wanted to (he didn’t want to), was always moving and reading and climbing trees and bobbing his head and wrestling Eddie into the grass and annoying anyone who happened to be holding something he found interesting. Richie was never lazy. He had ideas about what was and wasn’t important that didn’t line up with anything that adults would have preferred, but when something caught his attention he went after it.

“I mean, the jokes were never good, but the dream was always to get paid for doing nothing.”

Eddie stares at him for long moments. “No, it wasn’t.”

Richie’s head tilts back in mock surprise and then his eyebrows come up again, his gaze flicking to the side, dismissive. His lower eyelids are reddened where they meet his sclera—he’s definitely still tired, and if he’s adding coffee to the problem instead of sleeping, it’s not gonna get any better. He’s just gonna crash later. “I mean, for you, maybe.”

“You definitely wanted to be a ventriloquist,” Eddie says. “You wanted to be a famous ventriloquist and get out of Derry, come on.”

“Yeah, but there’s no such thing as a famous ventriloquist,” Richie says.

Eddie stares at him.

“Also puppets creep me the fuck out now,” Richie adds. “I don’t wanna talk about him, anyway.”

“What do you want to talk about?”

“Your nurse with the arms like ham hocks,” Richie replies immediately. “She called me out for playing music to you while you were sleeping. She’s like Bev’s height, purple hair. Scares me. I don’t argue with the hospital anymore, you know, in case she puts me in a half-nelson.”

Eddie continues staring at him for several long moments, trying to imagine it. He doesn’t know what a half-nelson is, but Richie’s _big_ , especially when he’s treating the plastic chair like it’s a jungle gym, and Tracy is both very small and very nice. He hadn’t noticed her arms being particularly thick, but she was able to support Eddie’s weight. A grin grows over his face at the thought of her physically intimidating Richie, and then he starts giggling. Little, hiccing spurts of laughter.

It’s not exactly comfortable. He has the faint feeling that he’s doing something wrong—those signals of pain telling him _something is wrong_ as though he doesn’t already know. But he’s felt like that for his entire life, no matter what he was doing. At this point the hurt is almost reassuring. He’s still here.

Richie stares back at him, grin stretching out wide and humorless. “Wow. So you take morphine and suddenly I’m funny? That’s the secret to comedy?”

Eddie rolls his eyes. “You were always funny. And I told you, they turned down my morphine.”

Richie knows he’s funny. He self-aggrandizes to the point of parody, but he always has. For every _beep beep_ the gang dished out, he got twelve laughs. Eddie never really wanted him to shut up, even when he was telling him to shut up, even when his jokes were really stupid. Even when he was hunched over his phone at the airport, waiting for YouTube videos to buffer while Richie gargled out some truly pathetic ghost-written jokes, Eddie never closed the window. He wanted to keep hearing Richie talk, like he was waiting for something.

Maybe it was for the real Richie to emerge onstage. For him to say something that sounded familiar.

Richie blinks once and then his grin shifts a little, becoming real and crinkling his eyes. “Oh am I?”

Does he think that this is part of the game? That Eddie’s immediately going to open up this vulnerability made by a genuine compliment, just to knock him down a peg again?

He thinks, suddenly, of Bev and Richie pretending to kiss in the restaurant, right before Bev shoved food in his mouth. The surge of anxiety that spiked in Eddie’s stomach, making him wonder if he’d had too much to drink—and he definitely had, but that wasn’t why he felt so sick; and then Bev threw shrimp in Richie’s mouth and they all cheered, and the moment was gone.

He stares at Richie, trying to hold him in place with his gaze. “You know I think you’re funny, right?”

Richie blinks, his eyes wide. “I—uh.” And he says nothing. Trashmouth, speechless.

There’s a knock on the doorframe and Eddie is abruptly furious. He and Richie both turn their heads to look in the same moment.

“Sorry,” Tracy says. Eddie immediately wonders if she heard what Richie said about her and her arms—which, now that Eddie’s looking, don’t seem any larger than normal arms. “It’s about time to get up and walk around. We really have to do the exercises and the spectrometer. I can come back in five minutes, just to give you a warning.”

“It’s fine,” Richie says. He glances at Eddie. “If you need—it’s fine.”

Eddie abruptly remembers that he’s wearing a hospital gown. “You can come back,” he says. He really needs Richie not to be here for this. “I mean, it won’t take long. You can come back after.”

“I mean, I can give someone else a turn,” Richie says. “Who have you seen today? Since I kicked Stan out?”

“Richie,” Eddie says. “Leave and come back.”

Richie blinks once.

Eddie tries to soften his tone. “All right?”

“I—yeah. If you want.” He gets up, holding his coffee and his Skittles, and turns to go. He pauses in the door when he makes eye contact with Tracy, who steps to the side to let him out, and then glances over his shoulder at Eddie as he leaves.

“You didn’t have to do that,” Tracy tells Eddie. He can still hear Richie’s footsteps going down the hall. “I was just giving you the five-minute warning in case you needed to wrap up your conversation.”

“He’ll be back,” Eddie says. Or he better be. “I’d rather get it out of the way.”

“You are braver than most of my patients,” Tracy tells him.

* * *

Richie does come back, but he brings Mike with him. Eddie has no idea what to do with the surge of irritation that rolls through him. He’s pretty sure that’s not a side-effect of morphine, that’s a side-effect of Richie, but he genuinely enjoys Richie’s company and this confuses him.

But also he loves Mike Hanlon—Mike fucking Hanlon, who stayed in Derry longer than any of them, when Eddie and Richie both were ready to bail after about four hours—and who still has a bandage on his forearm, mostly hidden by the sleeve of his flannel shirt. Mike doesn’t look tired, the way that Beverly and Stan do. He looks awake and alert, even if the creases carved deep in his face are still there. Better yet, under the fluorescent lights of the hospital room, Eddie feels like he can really _see_ Mike. Like Mike’s been hidden in shadow the entire time they were in Derry. He can’t decide whether that was psychological or not.

“Hey,” Mike says. “How do you feel?”

Richie sits down in the chair again, this time the one closest to the door, and crosses his legs. His coffee is gone, but he’s still fidgeting with the plastic Skittles bag. It makes little crinkles under his fingers.

“I feel pretty good,” Eddie says. “I mean, I’ve never been impaled before—”

Richie coughs.

“Fuck off,” Eddie replies automatically, as Mike grins. “—but I feel like, all things considered, I’m doing great.”

“Man, you have no idea how happy I am to hear that,” Mike says. He turns around, estimates the distance between Eddie’s bed and the little plastic chairs, and drags the empty one forward by about a foot. Then he sits close and wraps his hand around Eddie’s fingers where they hang casually over the safety rail. “Jeez, you’re cold.”

“It’s so fucking cold in here,” Eddie says. “I’m not allowed to sweat.”

“I’ve got—hang on, man.” Mike releases Eddie’s fingers and then pulls a pair of gloves out of his jacket. He slides one onto Eddie’s uncooperative left hand, pulling each digit through its little sleeve. Eddie blinks at his own pale fingertips, wondering why Mike Hanlon has fingerless gloves in 2016 like he’s Ash Ketchum or something, and then Mike pulls a fold of the material over and covers all Eddie’s fingers. They’re mittens that switch to being fingerless gloves, and the mitten sleeve is fleece. “My doctor recommended these, they’re the warmest things ever. I’ve got arthritis in my hands.”

Eddie turns his left hand from side to side, looking at his palm, and then carefully holds his other hand out for Mike to outfit. It feels almost childish, allowing someone to put mittens on him, like he’s a kid resistant to dressing for the weather (and Eddie was always resistant to dressing for the weather, as a kid, because his mother would have had him out in a sweater in June if he didn’t bolt out of the house before she could get it out of the closet). But with Mike, it’s okay, he tells himself. Mike was the one who lifted him into the basket of his bike, after Eddie broke his arm. Mike is the kind of man who does what has to be done.

“From jerking it?” Richie asks.

Mike snorts. “Yeah, Rich, from jerking it. No, you asshole, I’m a librarian, I have repetitive stress injury. My shoulder’s fucked, too.”

“I’ve got some kind of stress injuries from this week.”

“I am literally in a hospital bed,” Eddie reminds him.

“Are you?” Richie asks. “I hadn’t noticed.”

Mike has a nostalgic, indulgent kind of look on his face, like he’d be happy to listen to Richie and Eddie bicker for as long as Eddie can stay awake. Eddie supposes that’s something he had to take into account when he decided to come into the room with them.

“How did you get a degree in library sciences without leaving Derry?” Eddie mumbles, confused.

“They’ve got online degrees,” Mike replies. “I did my thesis on Derry, actually.”

“Christ, that’s depressing,” Eddie says.

“Yeah. It’s in the DPL but the ink keeps degrading, believe it or not. I gave up printing and having it bound over and over again.” He shrugs. “But I felt like I ought to put some of this to use. And I did leave Derry sometimes—like, I was up here to do interviews.”

“Job interviews?”

“Nah, primary source interviews. They’ve got old men in nursing homes—well, he’s died now, but he was willing to talk to me. I came to Bangor.”

“Huh.” Part of Eddie’s brain spins a little deliriously, thinking about town limits and what it means to be a citizen of Derry. How long did it take him to forget, when his mother dragged him away from his friends kicking and screaming? How long did it take him to start living under the impression that he’d never had friends? And did his mother remember things that he didn’t?

Even if she had, she’d never have told him. And she’s dead now, so there’s no use worrying about it.

“How’s your arm?” Eddie asks him.

Mike grins a little bit and shows him the edge of the bandage. “I mean, I haven’t been impaled, so I’m doing pretty okay too.”

“It’s not so bad,” Eddie mumbles.

“Jesus Christ,” says Richie.

Eddie genuinely has no idea why Richie’s so combative at the moment. Maybe it’s because Eddie isn’t following the script he expects, isn’t bickering back the way he wants. Well, fuck him, Eddie’s tired and, again, _literally in a hospital bed_. He feels like he ought to be able to do whatever he wants.

“So they’ve got me doing these deep breathing exercises,” Eddie says, “and I passed out doing some of them.”

“Yeah?” Mike prompts.

“Yeah, and I woke up, and a very nice Trinidadian doctor asked me, ‘Was that your first seizure?’ Which is, of course, the question you want to hear after passing out.”

“I mean, yeah,” Mike agrees. “If someone isn’t standing next to my bed to ask me that when I wake up in the morning, I can’t really have a good day.” Eddie grins at that. Mike squeezes his fingers through the mitten. “You having seizures now, man?”

“No, that’s just it. Apparently I blacked out and just twitched.”

“Well, that gives me such confidence in the medical expertise here,” Mike says. “You know, and their ability to recognize seizures.”

“Yeah, and I blacked out and I heard someone yell, ‘The patient’s having a seizure!’ And I thought, ‘Oh, wow, sucks for the patient, I guess.’”

Mike laughs. “Jesus, Eddie.”

Eddie glances past him toward the door, but Richie, who has heard this story before, is still eating Skittles, and he’s not smiling.

“But they decided I didn’t have a seizure after all and when I woke up they gave me a Sprite. Mike.” Eddie squeezes Mike’s hand back with his left. “Mike, Sprite is so good.”

“After you pass out?”

“Yes.” He stares Mike in the eye, trying to convey the intensity that was the experience of drinking Sprite, in the tiny sips that Tracy allowed him, with all the pauses to see if he was about to throw it back up or not. “It was literally the best thing I’ve ever drunk.”

“You ought to do commercials.”

“I remember thinking that I could not want that Sprite more if LeBron James came up to me and offered it to me.”

“Is LeBron James in this hospital?”

Eddie grins back. “Yeah, you haven’t seen him?”

“Nah, man, I’ve been going back and forth getting my shit in order, must have missed the only other bigass black dude in Maine.”

“Well, he just hangs out here sometimes and offers patients Sprites. It’s part of their new advertising campaign.”

“And charitable write-offs.”

“I mean, obviously.” Eddie leans his head back against his pillows, tired, but pleasantly so. It’s like the tired of waking up in the middle of the night to hear it raining, and knowing that he’s inside and warm and he doesn’t have to go anywhere. Freedom to be tired without the knowledge that he has to get up and go to work and run errands and talk to people. “What are you getting in order?” he asks, trying to prompt Mike to talk a little more so he doesn’t have to.

“Well,” Mike says, and there’s a hesitation in his voice that immediately concerns Eddie. He frowns for him to go on. “I was suspended from my job.”

Eddie stares at him. “What? Why?” Ben told him that the whole Bowers thing was taken care of.

“Yeah,” Mike says. “There was—” He gives Eddie a significant wide-eyed look, a prompt for him to just go with what he’s about to say. “—some damage to a display of artifacts that technically belong to the town. Might just be kids committing some vandalism, breaking glass and the like, but there are no cameras, and my boss was… _concerned_ about the security risk of having someone living in the library building, you know how it is.”

There’s a certain resignation in his glare that makes Eddie think that he doesn’t know how it is, but Mike definitely knows how it is, and has put up with that in Maine for a long time.

“What, do they think you threw a rager in the library?” Eddie asks. Because Mike kind of did—they all brought alcohol, but they’re also all forty years old and boring, and nobody could have anticipated the escaped mental patient or the ax-murder. “Does anyone in Derry actually give a shit about… anything?”

Mike licks his lips, his gaze going to the window behind Eddie. “Funny thing is,” he says, his voice contemplative, “I think they’re starting to. Like, about weird things, too. Nothing like… like what happened when we were kids. But people are starting to look around them. To be more aware of their surroundings and the people who live around them. And there are… consequences to the things that people do, that there haven’t always been in Derry. It’s a good thing,” he adds quickly, his eyebrows lifting, like he’s in a hurry to explain to Eddie that it’s good that people won’t stand around and watch teenagers beat the shit out of each other anymore, or whatever the fuck Mike’s thinking of in this moment specifically. “But like, scrutiny has its downsides too.”

So Mike is… watched. He made the joke about LeBron James being conspicuous, but Mike is also conspicuous, in his way. By virtue of his height and his skin and his haunted eyes. And maybe it’s not charges of conspiracy to commit murder, but if Mike’s being suspended for something that—well, even the story that Mike said, it’s not Mike’s fault.

“So what the fuck are they suspending you for?” Eddie demands.

Mike brings his eyes back to Eddie and then shrugs. “What’s it called, when a company fucks up really bad in the public eye? Like, sues someone, makes them out to be the bully?”

Eddie blinks for long moments and then asks, “Optics?”

“Yeah. I think it’s optics,” Mike says. “Optics of having a librarian literally living in the library. And—it doesn’t matter, anyway. I cleared my stuff out and tendered my resignation.”

He doesn’t know why the words strike him like a blow to the gut. “What?” he manages. He glances at Richie, but Richie is still staring at the wall, angrily chewing Skittles. So he’s heard this before.

“Yeah,” Mike says. “I’m—gonna leave, I think.”

Eddie stares at him, reaching back for memories. “And… go to Florida?” he guesses.

Mike grins at him. “Maybe, on the way. I was thinking about hitting national parks to start with—the kooky towns next to them, making a whole road trip of it.” His expression turns dry, contemplative. “I’d say they can’t be any weirder then Derry, but I don’t want to jinx myself.”

And it makes sense. Mike has been trapped for so long—physically trapped, much more than Eddie ever felt that he was trapped in his own life, because Eddie’s life was his own fault, and Mike was carrying something that none of the rest of them could. If Mike had ever decided _fuck this, this isn’t my problem_ —which it wasn’t—and high-tailed it out of Derry like the rest of them, like Richie always wanted to do when they were kids, he would have forgotten too. And It would have awoken again, after twenty-seven years, and feasted for another year. And then it would have gone back to sleep. And none of them would have been any the wiser. Maybe it would have been the way that Pennywise offered them, when It wanted to trade Bill for the rest of their freedom. Maybe they all would have gone on to lead long, happy lives.

Eddie closes his eyes at his own thoughts. He wasn’t happy. Not the kind of aching despair that Mike had to live with every day, just knowing that It existed at all, but he wasn’t happy. But Eddie doesn’t think he could be truly happy, never remembering them. His friends. The only real friends he ever had.

God, what if they forget again as soon as they leave?

“So you’re going?” Eddie asks, opening his eyes again. His eyelids seem to stick. He’s tired.

“Yeah,” Mike says. “I wanted to make sure that you were okay before I went, but—I mean, there’s no time limit on it. I’ll stick around until you’re released if you want, be part of your… your pit crew, I don’t know.”

Richie snorts.

“Don’t be stupid,” Eddie says automatically. What is Mike going to do for him, medically, aside from putting mittens on his cold hands and listening to his stupid jokes about LeBron James wandering the halls of Bangor hospitals? “No, you should—you should go. You deserve to go. I mean, out of all of us, you deserve—”

“We don’t get what we deserve, Eddie,” Mike says, with a grave tone that stuns Eddie into silence.

But not Richie. Richie pipes up. “Well, that’s for fucking sure.”

It’s bitter, not just defeated, and it makes Eddie look around in confusion. “What?”

But Richie’s not paying attention to him—which is fucking weird. Eddie realizes that he’s just accustomed to having Richie’s attention at all times, no matter who else is in the room. Demonic fortune cookies attacking them? Richie climbs out of the way onto the sideboard and calls out for Eddie, even as Ben tries to defend them both from a swooping bat.

“You said we filled the letter of the promise,” Richie says, anger in his voice only barely suppressed. “Just by coming back. Just by hearing you out.”

“And you did,” Mike says. He’s calm now, deliberately calm, his calmness increasing the more frustrated that Richie gets, and they feed into each other. “It was more than I really expected of any of you. You’re all… better than I could have hoped.”

Richie stands up suddenly, bag of Skittles still clutched in his free hand. “Right,” he says, and jabs his pointer finger in Eddie’s direction. “We didn’t have to do any of that. We could have walked away. So we fucking know that people don’t get what they deserve, because he sure as fuck doesn’t deserve _that_.”

Eddie feels…

Eddie’s skin switches off, abruptly. That’s how it feels. The cold in him, peripheral, something that couldn’t get to his core as long as he had the waffle blanket and the socks and the mittens and the warmth of his friends’ hands pressing into his, suddenly strikes deep into his stomach and freezes him inside.

And when he speaks, his voice comes out cold, too. Hard, like metal. He barely recognizes it as himself.

“Richie.”

Richie, who has been talking _about_ Eddie in front of him without really talking to him, throwing him at Mike like a weapon, like a sharp piece of garbage Bev picked up on the lawn of Neibolt house, switches gears abruptly. He stands there, looking as baffled as he did when Eddie reminded him they couldn’t come back and deal with this in thirty years, because they would be seventy years old and no good in a fight then. Frank incomprehension.

“Take a walk,” Eddie tells him.

Richie blinks. His mouth opens, closes, and opens again. “What?”

“Take a walk,” Eddie repeats. “Walk it off. Come back when you’ve calmed down.”

“When _I’ve_ calmed down?” Richie demands, like there’s anyone else in the room getting ready to throw a fit.

“You heard me,” Eddie says.

Richie adjusts his grip on the bag of Skittles, drawing it tight to his chest. His forearm folds across his body like a shield, and he draws in a deep breath that makes him seem to swell, shoulders lifting, ribs expanding. Eddie finds himself mirroring it, just watching him—feels his own ribs stretch and ache and a worrying pulse from somewhere closer to his stomach, not nausea but a surgical site reminding him, _Hi. You got hurt pretty bad. Might want to take it easy._

“Fine,” Richie says, and turns and leaves. Eddie can hear the half-stomp of his feet all the way down the hall. He and Mike just sit in silence, listening to him go.

Then Eddie takes in another deep breath, letting it hiss through his nostrils. “Has he been like that the whole time?”

“Yeah,” Mike says.

“I’m so sorry,” Eddie says, without really understanding why he’s apologizing for Richie. Maybe he knows that it’s because he’s hurt, and without him being injured, Richie would have a lot less ammunition. Only as much ammunition as the rest of them had.

Mike shakes his head. “It’s fine.” It’s not, but Mike carries on. “Have you two… talked? About?”

Oh Jesus. It’s that transparent.

“About him saving my life?” Eddie offers, because he feels self-conscious and on the spot all of a sudden. Talking about it with Richie is one thing, but he’s still not sure of how that’s going to go, not when Richie’s response to _I love you_ was to laugh. Talking about it with Mike before talking about it with Richie is, like telling anyone in so many words that he wants to leave his wife before he breaks it to Myra, out of the question.

“Yeah,” Mike lies smoothly, like they’re exactly the words he would have chosen. He’s so full of shit.

“You think he’d be this pissy if we had?”

Mike gives a short chuckle. “Yeah.”

Eddie stares at him. “What?”

Apparently Mike didn’t expect that response, because he looks around at Eddie in confusion. “I mean, yeah,” he says slowly, like he’s got to defend his answer now. “He decked Bill when you broke your arm as a kid. I’m Bill now.”

“I—” Eddie didn’t see the fight, but he remembers the schism it caused in their friend group. Remembers Richie climbing through his window the day after Eddie was released from the hospital, hands raw where he’d skinned them on the bark of the tree outside. _I hit Bill_ , he admitted, and then burst into tears. And Eddie was barely allowed outside of the house after that, not until he blew up at his mother over the pills and the inhaler after he got the call saying that Bev was gone, but he knows that no one went to Stan’s bar mitzvah except Richie. As if any of it were _Stan’s_ fault; apparently no one wanted to risk seeing Richie there. It made Stan’s ceremony into a battleground.

Eddie is not going to allow his hospital room to become a battleground. Not for anyone except him.

“Did he hit you?” he asks, because that feels like the pertinent question.

“No,” Mike says. “I think he might have, if Ben weren’t there. Ben told him to stop being a child and to get in the shower or he’d strip him himself, and I think that was sufficiently intimidating to make him go clean himself up.”

Eddie stares and then asks, “What the fuck is happening outside?”

Mike shakes his head. “Nothing much. People are making plans. I mean—I’m kind of idly planning out my route, and Bill’s wife came in and they’re taking emergency leave from work, but I think they’ll have to go soon. Bill’s had his phone on mute the entire time he’s been here, so he’s definitely dodging something important. I’m lucky, I’m in a stage of my life where I can just pack up and go.”

 _Pack up and go._ Some of the anger and indifference and iron-hardness melts out of Eddie at the words. He wants that as badly as he wanted that Sprite, he realizes. The memory of slamming the trunk of a car shut on a bunch of suitcases, those old paper maps that no one uses anymore tucked in the glove compartment. No one to answer to but himself.

“I’m not mad at you,” Eddie says. “You know that, right?”

Mike grins a little sadly, but shrugs his left shoulder. “I kind of think maybe you should be.”

“Fuck you,” Eddie replies automatically, and then shakes his head. “Shit, sorry.” It’s force of habit, now he remembers what it’s like to talk to Richie again. “No, man, you think I did it because you asked me to?”

Cause and effect-wise, yes, that’s exactly what happened, but only because Mike had to remind him of the dangers out there in the first place. There was a time when Eddie thinks he would have died for Bill Denbrough, if Bill had asked him to, but Eddie’s forty years old now. He still feels… close to all of them, in a way he’s never felt close to anyone, in a way he’s so relieved to remember it fills him up like food, like milk, but some of his slavish devotion is less… targeted, now. It’s less intense, maybe, but only because it spread from just Bill to all of them. A ring made of the six of them, all holding bloodied hands, and something pulsing through their joined arms.

“Why’d you do it, then?” Mike asks. “I meant what I said, any of you could have left after you remembered and I would have understood. I was just… astonished that any of you showed up. If I’d been one of the ones who left, I don’t know if I would have come back.”

Eddie hears something like fear in that. Mike’s on the verge of leaving, and they don’t know what separating is going to do to their memories. Whether they’ll fade like the scars on their palms again. Whether they’ll ever see each other again.

Eddie closes his eyes and tries to find an answer for Mike. A real answer, not an honest but unhelpful _I don’t know_.

“I think,” he says into his uncertainty, “because I knew it had to be me. Because nobody other than us could have done it. And I wasn’t going to let you—to leave all of you alone. And…” He doesn’t like how self-sacrificing that sounds, too authentic but too stupid at the same time, like the people who say _I care too much_ or _I’m too attentive_ when they’re asked to list a weakness in a job interview. “…I haven’t done much with my life,” he admits.

Mike blinks at him. “You’re very successful,” he says.

Eddie shrugs, hurts himself, winces, lowers his shoulder, and shakes his head. “Fuck,” he hisses, and then takes a deep breath. “Not like the others. Not like Bill or Ben or Bev.” He’s quietly successful in the way that Stan is, at best, and Stan is doing better because Stan has his own accounting firm, he’s his own boss, he isn’t answerable to anyone. “I mean… I think that’s the best thing I’ve done. I think—facing It—that’s the best I’ve ever been.”

Mike looks at him for long moments and then says, “No.”

Eddie’s just unburdened himself here. The flat refusal throws him for a loop, like a record scratching. “What do you mean, _no_?”

“You’ve always been the same,” Mike says. “I mean—it was always you. You were always you. You just… forgot. But you were still made of the same stuff. Otherwise you wouldn’t have come back. You didn’t remember who I was, when I called you out of the blue, but you still came back. You wrecked your fucking car when I called, and I went, _Are you okay_? And you said, _yeah!_ ” He laughs, suddenly, smiling.

“Did I?” Eddie asks.

“Oh yeah, I can’t make that shit up, man.”

“I don’t remember that.” He was too thrown by surprise and dread he didn’t understand to be intelligent at that moment.

“Yeah. That was Eddie Kaspbrak, right there,” Mike says. He shakes his head. “Just the same, after thirty years.”

Eddie looks at him for long moments, remembering Mike down the line. Simply-dressed, jeans and a white t-shirt, hard-working, hunted. Still looked at the world like there was always more to uncover, even after the horror that was that summer. Half ready to run at any given moment, but sticking around for these six idiots he just met only because they were marginally less racist than the other kids in town, that they were ready to declare him one of them because they hated the people who hated him. They shared one apocalyptic rock fight together and—it’s not like the kid who played at throwing pennies with him and Ben and Beverly, who cried when he lost and cussed Bev out until Ben chased him off. They knew almost the moment they saw Mike that he was one of them. And Mike was unfailingly loyal, beyond reason and self-preservation. Better than any of them could have asked for.

“You’re just the same too, Mikey,” he says, surprised to hear the baby name come out of his mouth.

Mike looks at him like he knows what Eddie’s thinking, but Eddie can’t tell whether he agrees. He’s beautiful, Eddie’s astonished to notice. He was always the tallest of them, always the strongest, but now he’s out from under Derry’s cloud, Eddie can see it. He feels his cheeks heat to think it.

Slowly, Mike shakes his head, his eyes far away. “I hope you’re right, man,” he says. “I hope you’re right.”

* * *

Bill comes in next, leaning anxiously around the doorway like he expects Eddie to be asleep or something. Unlike Stan, he doesn’t bring his wife. “Hey,” he says, when he sees that Eddie’s awake.

“Hey,” Eddie says. He remembers how it felt when they were kids, just to be acknowledged by Bill.

“How’re you feeling?”

He’s going to get tired of answering that question very soon. “Drugged,” he replies. “Mike loaned me mittens.” He splays his fingers inside the mitten to show him.

Bill comes into the white room, hesitant, his hair just as weirdly bright as Bev’s was, except for the gray streak swiping up from his widow’s peak. He’s wearing another plaid shirt over a t-shirt, and he looks exhausted. Not even the shreds of relaxation or curiosity that Bev and Mike still have. Bill looks like he hasn’t slept in ten years, like he hasn’t slept since he ran off to the Canal Days festival and saw the kid die in the house of mirrors. And honestly, maybe he hasn’t. That sounds like Bill.

“How are _you_ feeling?” Eddie asks, because he’s too tired to carry the conversation himself and he also kind of wants an explanation. Like Bill should be called to account for why he looks so terrible.

Bill’s hands are deep in his jeans pocket, and he gives a short laugh in answer.

“That good?” Eddie slowly raises his right arm so that Bill can see the IV tube where it’s taped to his skin. “You want some of this? Cheer you up?”

Bill smiles at the joke and creeps over to one of the chairs. “I’ll pass for now,” he says.

“Good. I don’t want to share.”

Bill laughs at that again. “Mike said you’re doing pretty well.”

“I mean, I’ve never been impaled before, but honestly I expected it to be kind of worse,” Eddie replies honestly.

“You think about that a lot?”

“Nah, I leave it to the horror writers.” He can hear his own voice, sounding strange the way it did when he was angry with Richie early. Not metal-hard and cold this time, but definitely Manhattan, exaggerating the years and space between him and his one-time best friend. He’s definitely on the verge of falling asleep again—not passing out, he’s just tired and talking to the Losers has taken it out of him. “Did you get the inventory of everything wrong with me? To use for a book later?”

“I used to think I was very original,” Bill tells him, with the confessional aura of a man talking to a priest.

Eddie doesn’t really have the energy to laugh either, but he smiles hard and tilts his head back at that. “Make it a metaphor for midlife crises, you know.”

“It’s fucking hamhanded, is what it is,” Bill says.

There’s quiet silence. Under the window, there’s a faint hum from the radiator that Eddie still believes isn’t doing shit, because he’s so fucking cold. He hopes it’s the blood loss and he’ll regain the ability to self-regulate his temperature again, because if he has to be this fucking cold for however long it takes him to start producing more desirable fluid from his chest (he didn’t ask for too much detail about what his doctors are looking for, having the vague idea that knowing too much is bad for him) he’s going to demand Richie stage a jailbreak for him. He used to walk around in shorts well into October in Maine. He’s accustomed to running hot.

“I owe you an apology,” Bill says.

Eddie looks around at him and frowns. If Bill is about to confess that he’s been short with the other Losers because he’s been worried about Eddie too—or worse, if Richie talked Bill into thinking he needs to apologize—well, Eddie doesn’t know what he’s going to do. He’s probably going to take a nap first. But then he’s gonna have to do something.

“Why?” Eddie demands, incredulous. Because he’s been stabbed and impaled within a twelve-hour window, and Bill did neither of those, and at the moment those are Eddie’s biggest problems.

“For… screaming at you,” Bill says.

Eddie genuinely does not remember for several long seconds. Then he remembers Richie clinging to his wrist, shrieking indignantly _Next time?_ And then he remembers Stan screaming, his voice rising in what Eddie, though dying of blood loss at the moment, was dimly aware was not English—and the rest of their voices rising too. Angry at It for what It did to them, what It was doing to Eddie right then, righteous fury. Eddie found himself drifting but oddly comforted by it too. Until then, he couldn’t remember ever having six people on his side.

“In the kitchen,” Bill clarifies.

Richie on the floor, a massive shape leaning over him, something like a dog but twisted, wearing scraps of yellow and blue silk on its torso, hands distended into claws. Eddie, paralyzed in the corner, unable to think of anything other than the leper in the pharmacy basement and how It crammed Its tongue in his mother’s mouth, afraid that It was about to do the same to Richie and Eddie would be unable to do anything other than _watch_ —when Ben arrived with the piece of fencing. Ben brought the silver for the slugs when they were kids; Ben Hanscom is apparently not afraid of werewolves; and when the werewolf threw itself on Ben he just rolled, and Bev leapt on top of it, unafraid, hands feeling around for its throat.

And when they’d killed it—not It, just it—Bill turned to Eddie in a rage. _The kid’s dead,_ he said, grabbing hold of Eddie’s collar. _The kid’s dead—you want Richie dead too? You want Richie too?_

And Eddie went… somewhere he didn’t recognize. Somewhere small, where Bill was mad at him and there was nothing he could do but cry and apologize. Bill had never been angry at him like that—annoyed, sure, but that was usually when he and Richie were being annoying. It never mattered like that did, just then. _Please don’t be mad, Billy. I was just scared._

“Don’t even worry about it,” Eddie manages. There’s a sting of humiliation to the memory. Part of him resents Bill for bringing it into the room with him.

“No,” Bill says. “I—it wasn’t you I was mad at. You get that, right?”

“Yeah.” Eddie’s an adult now. A real banged-up adult, but he’s capable of putting things in perspective, now that he no longer feels he’s staring down the barrel of his mortality. He’s capable of looking at things from Bill’s point of view. It’s not like Bill hasn’t seen him through his own share of meltdowns. More than his share.

Bill fidgets, pushing at his hair with his hand, smoothing down that gray stripe. They got old, somewhere. Part of Eddie wishes he could pinpoint the moment, identify the tipping point between the Eddie he wanted to be and the Eddie he turned out to be. The veil sliding into place. Childhood slipping away.

“I was scared too,” Bill says, his voice low and soft.

Well, yeah. Eddie knows that. That’s part of the point.

“And grieving,” Eddie says. “I get it. It’s fine.”

“It’s not,” Bill says. “I—I don’t think I ever really stopped grieving Georgie, actually. I think I just buried it deep down for twenty-eight years. Like… skin over a blister. And coming back to Derry was just like…”

But Eddie understands. The way that the blister bursts and rubs raw. Infection. Sepsis. Gangrene. Death.

 _Okay, that’s not usually the outcome of blisters, dumbass,_ he tells himself, and tries to focus on Bill, who clearly wants to have a serious conversation here.

“Did I ever tell you?” Bill asks, lowering his hand and looking up at Eddie as though he’s just remembered he’s there. There confessional aura is still very much in the room. Eddie’s family were Presbyterians and they don’t really go for that, but Eddie has gathered the gist.

He blinks at Bill, feeling like he’s losing the rope of the conversation a bit. Is it because he’s tired or because Bill is?

“Tell me what?” he asks.

Bill lowers his gaze to his folded hands, clearly considering his words carefully. “You were like a brother to me,” he says softly. “I mean—you reminded me of him. I think because you were—”

“Doll-sized?” Eddie suggests dryly. He’s taller than Bill Denbrough now. He has that going for him.

Bill smiles apologetically, like he knows what Eddie’s thinking. “You were littler than me. And you had the big eyes. I mean, I chose to hang out with you, and Georgie was my annoying kid brother, but. After.” Hands still folded, he stretches his fingers out straight and looks down at them. “I love you like a brother. You know that, right?”

Eddie has been… so lonely. For so long. Just him and Myra, and no one ever really coming close to that thing at the center of him, that thing he drew the curtains over for years that turned out to be a furious child, full of indignation and the desire to protect his friends.

There’s another part of him that’s pissed that it’s Bill Denbrough in his hospital room, telling him on his sickbed that he loves him, and Richie Tozier is out there picking fights with all their friends. But that’s something Eddie will have to deal with later.

“I love you too,” Eddie says, and means it. That was half of what startled him, coming back here and meeting them all again. That there was not just one person he’d loved his whole life without remembering—that there were six, and at the time they were all so central to his being that he built himself on their foundation, and that he’d managed to turn forty without remembering. At the time _like a brother_ didn’t really cover it—Eddie Kaspbrak loved Stuttering Bill the way he felt he was supposed to love God, the way that he would have loved an older boy who took him under his wing and treated him like he was cool and made him feel special except Bill was the same age as him, the way he loved someone who seemed big and bold and driven and took care of him and—

 _Fuck_ , Eddie realizes with dawning horror. _I absolutely had a crush on Bill._

And of course Bill has to be in the room with him for this revelation, still dressing the same as he did when he was thirteen, minus the jean shorts. Two inches shorter than Eddie and apologizing for shouting at him and telling him that Eddie reminded him of Georgie.

 _Wow_ , Eddie thinks, and knows that he will never, ever be able to tell another human being about this. It’s kind of unfair, in a way. He feels like he needs a witness to the dramatic irony, someone to look at him and go, _Aw, man, that sucks_ , except he also never wants to talk about this ever and maybe never think about it again.

Anyway, those feelings are gone now. And thank god. Eddie’s forty years old and he can only deal with one lovelorn teenage crush coming back to haunt him. He wouldn’t go so far as to say that what he felt for Bill qualified as that, even, it was so subconscious and tangled up in hero-worship, and also he was maybe seven years old when it started. There wasn’t even the hint of proto-sexual attraction, just a deep worshipfulness. Eddie felt like Bill saw him as a person.

And here Bill is, telling him that he saw him as something Georgie-adjacent. Maybe even a suspiciously similar replacement goldfish. Eddie’s not sure. But it doesn’t hurt his feelings. He was in that circle, making that oath with the rest of them. He’s sure that Bill sees him as his own person now.

“So I just wanted to—” Bill grimaces and then smiles a little self-effacingly, like _can you believe me_. “—this is gonna sound really fucking stupid, but I just wanted to make sure that you didn’t… do what you did, in response to what I said. Because I made you feel like you had to.”

Eddie stares at him for a long moment, his brain trying to set aside his fatigue to deal with this problem. “Is Richie being a bitch to you too?”

Bill frowns, apparently completely confused. “Richie?”

“Never mind,” Eddie says. “Apparently he’s walking around like he’s ready to fight Mike. I’m gonna tell you what I told him—I’m not… I’m not self-sacrificing like that. I mean, I—I love all of you, and I want to protect all of you, but it wasn’t like I was trying to be the hero. You didn’t bully me into it, or anything.”

Bill gives a small smile. “Beep beep, motherfucker?” he asks, and Eddie has a moment of spinning confusion where he tries to work out why Bill is beeping him, until he realizes that Bill is quoting him.

“Yeah,” Eddie says. “Beep beep. I mean.” He clears his throat and feels an answering ache somewhere much further down in his chest. “I mean, I would die for you, but probably not just because you asked anymore.”

Bill laughs, probably because he doesn’t understand how seriously Eddie would have taken that at eleven, maybe thirteen years old. When Eddie saw It he was scared, but Bill gathered them all together and asked them to avenge his brother, and they were stronger together than they would have been with It picking them off one by one. Bill was the center that held them together.

“I have to go home soon,” Bill tells him, which is what Eddie expected him to say when he came in here in the first place.

“Yeah, I figured.”

“You don’t mind?”

Eddie almost rolls his eyes. “Why would I mind? Is one of you suddenly going to reveal that you’ve been an expert surgeon this entire time?”

Bill pauses and then says dryly, “I’m guessing Mike said something along the same lines?”

“Yes. Come on. The—the net outcome—” He waves his left hand, gesturing with Mike’s mitten. “—of what happens to me will not be changed based on whether or not the six of you are camped out in the waiting room, taking turns to come see me.” He frowns. “Eight?”

“Eight,” Bill confirms. “Did you want to meet Audra?”

Eddie almost wants to pull his waffle blanket over his head. “Please do not bring an actual movie star in here, I feel disgusting enough as it is.”

Bill laughs softly. “She’s just a person.”

“She’s a beautiful person and I have a hole in my face, I can smell my own hair, and I haven’t shaved since—” He almost says _since an escaped mental patient stabbed me in the face_ but he remembers where they are and the likelihood of being overheard and catches himself in time. Instead he waves a hand, and Bill’s answering nod tells him that he understands.

“I promise she’s not going to hold it against you,” he says. “Not like the rest of us are doing much better.”

Eddie blows a raspberry in response to that bullshit, which makes Bill break into hiccupping laughter. “No,” Eddie says over his chortles. “I’m sure your wife is lovely. Do not introduce me to a movie star until I have had an actual shower.”

“Did you want help shaving?” Bill asks. “I can do that. Or you can ask Ben, he actually has practice sculpting facial hair. I’m sure he won’t hurt your face.”

Eddie is shaking his head already. “I think I’m gonna be a little touchy about anyone else approaching me with a blade for a while,” he says.

“Fair,” Bill allows. “Is there anything else I can do for you, while I’m here?”

It sounds like an _any final requests_ kind of thing. Maybe Bill has the same fears that Eddie does, about whether they’ll be able to stay in touch once they all leave Derry for the last time.

“Write down your phone number,” Eddie says. He was told that when he was admitted to the hospital he had neither phone nor wallet, meaning no forms of ID, which is how the rest of the Losers got him medical treatment without alerting Myra. Eddie is not looking forward to paying for his hospital stay, let alone finding out whether he still has health insurance through his work to pay for this. “Mike says my phone is…” He jerks his head to the side in as best a shrug as he can manage right now, trying to indicate _at the bottom of a sewer_.

“Yeah,” Bill says. “You got a pen?”

“No,” Eddie replies. “You’re the writer.”

“I’ll leave it with you,” Bill says. “What else?”

Eddie thinks about it. “You leaving soon?”

Bill sighs. “Yeah. I think I have to.”

“Yeah.” Eddie takes a deep breath— _ow_ , he’s definitely due for more morphine soon, he can’t even rationalize that pain away with how good it is to be alive. “So did anyone get my stuff from the townhouse, or am I still paying for a room I’m not in, or what?”

“Yeah, Richie got them,” Bill says. “Your bags, I mean.”

A little electric shock goes through him. He tries to ignore it. “Good. So in my toiletry bag, there’s a fuckton of pills.”

“Yeah,” Bill says, all _I am with you so far._

Eddie inhales again—careful this time—and then says, “I want you to get rid of all of them.”

Bill blinks once. “All your pills.”

“Yeah.”

“Are they, like, over the counter, or…?”

Eddie shakes his head. “There’s prescription shit in there too.”

“And you want me to get rid of all of them.”

“All of them.” Eddie holds his gaze, still bright blue. “Can you do that for me?” He swallows, waiting for Bill to ask questions. The little crackle of his throat is like thunder in his ears.

Bill looks back at him and then nods. “Yeah, I can do that.”

Eddie waits, but that’s all Bill says. He slumps back into the pillows; he’s so tired. “Thanks. That’s—that’d be a really… a big help, I mean.”

“Every single pill?”

“Every single pill,” he says, and closes his eyes. “I took Myra’s Midol with me, I don’t know what the fuck I thought I was going to do with that, but yeah, get rid of them all.” He needs them gone by the time he gets out of here, if he ever gets out of here.

“Okay,” Bill says. “That’s it?”

“That’s it,” Eddie says. “That and your number. And…” He opens his eyes. “Try not to forget us, if you can help it.”

“I promise,” Bill says, and Eddie believes him.

He closes his eyes again. “Good.” He takes another deep breath and lets it out slowly. It hitches, his chest constricting. It’s not pain, it’s the fear of walking out of the hospital without his safety net. That’s why Eddie needs Bill to take care of it. “I’m falling asleep,” he admits.

“I can go,” Bill says.

“I don’t want to throw you out.” He doesn’t open his eyes. “Just—I’m not gonna be super entertaining.”

“Nah, I’ll go, let you sleep.”

“Send Richie back in,” Eddie says. One of the nurses will come back to wake him up within the hour, to run him through breathing and coughing exercises. He’ll just rest until then.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yeah, with Stan alive and with the rest of the Losers when they confronted It in Neibolt, Richie was attacked by the Teenage Werewolf instead of by Stan's spider-head. Some of the special effects were lost (sorry Andrés, except not sorry, Andrés), but on the plus side: Stanley Uris.
> 
> I promise we're gonna get to the shippy stuff soon.
> 
> UPDATE:
> 
> [tastes like dogshit](https://twitter.com/ficreq/status/1242216849590431744) (Eddie demanding Richie's coffee with cute little grabby hands) by [@cytakigawa](https://twitter.com/cytakigawa) on Twitter (on their fic rec Twitter).


	3. Very Few Things

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Eddie is somehow simultaneously frozen in time and being hurtled along before he's ready. And Richie can't do a lot to help, but by God, he's going to try.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> All right! This is a long one. I'm not sorry. This has one of the scenes I was excited to write so I skipped straight ahead to it when I was doing NaNoWriMo--totally lost momentum for finishing the unfun parts, though, which I think is part of why I stopped after 20K in November. We broke 30K this chapter!
> 
> Content warnings: Eddie's still in a hospital. MAJOR content warnings for body fluids--emetophobia, phlegm, blood, poop, urinary catheters. Look, the more TMI I am about this part of the fic, the more excruciating detail I can use in the fun parts of the fic. Balance in all things. Eddie has reduced mobility and ability to take care of himself and he's mad about it. Titanic reference. Richie and Eddie fight over boundaries. WARNING for brief discussion of the AIDS crisis, HIV transmission, and bigoted rules about blood donation. If there are other things that need warnings, _please tell me_.

Eddie wakes up, knowing that he fell asleep but also not convinced it was a big deal. He’s a little perplexed that the nurses didn’t come by to run him through exercises again, but they do give him a break to get a good night’s sleep sometimes, and maybe this is like that. Immediately he has a surging, clutching anxiety— _blood clots! Pneumothorax_ —but he takes a breath and feels none of the sharp alarming pain, just the reassuring ache. He’s still here. He’s alive.

The dreams are still there, because he’s still on the morphine, and they’re… weird. Eerie. Not _frightening_ , per se—Eddie doesn’t know if he’ll ever be properly frightened again, the way that he’s been for his life since he came back to Maine—but they’re unsettling. The one he wakes from is just his brain twisting the quick glimpses of Richie he catches when he opens his eyes until he’s back in high school, and some kind of curse of paralysis is coming down over him, but Richie can save it through some complicated magical procedure that involves trying to use a guitar like an abacus. He wakes feeling oddly grateful to Richie, and sweaty, and generally disoriented.

Richie is still in the chair, by the loosest definition of “in.” It would be more accurate to say he’s barely perched on top of one chair, looking as though he could go toppling over at any moment, stretched out across both chairs, one foot braced on the furthest armrest, his knee jabbed up at a sharp angle. The other leg is crossed over that. He looks positively geographic there, assembled like a mountain range on the far side of the room. It doesn’t look even a little bit comfortable.

On his folded knee, he has his phone balanced carefully, and his headphones are in. He doesn’t look forty years old. He looks… young and sharp-boned and somehow ageless. And he’s not still—his head is bobbing back and forth. At first Eddie thinks that he’s listening to music, but then he watches Richie’s eyebrows climb, his expression pull into incredulity, into a scowl. He waves one big hand like he’s swatting something aside, and Eddie realizes abruptly that Richie’s talking to himself. Or arguing with himself. Silently.

The fondness rolls through him, intense as a wave crashing. He hears his heart monitor pick up and he waits for Richie to notice, but he’s completely in his own little world. It’s kind of fun to watch him—the unexamined comedian—as Richie continues his wordless monologue, until at last he turns his head and makes eye contact with Eddie. Then his face blanks out and he freezes with his arm still up mid-gesture, eyes wide and caught.

“No, go on,” Eddie says, but the words bubble and creak out, choked with phlegm. He rolls his eyes and sits up to cough properly, feeling his lungs inflate all the way at the bottom and the little reassuring creak of pain. He twists away and covers his mouth with his elbow. When he coughs, the sharp percussion has an answering stab of pain in his torso— _one, two, three_.

“Do you need the nurse?” Richie asks. “Or the—the doctor, or—”

Eddie shakes his head. It’s a productive cough, at least. The stuff’s coming up and it sits thick in the back of his mouth. “Tissue?” he asks, pointing towards the box sitting on the sink.

Richie’s phone clatters to the floor as he lunges across the room to get Eddie what he asked for. Eddie winces automatically, still coughing. Richie comes around the foot of the bed and holds the tissue out to Eddie. Eddie takes it and braces himself.

If there’s blood, he’ll have to call the nurse. It’ll be a whole thing. He doesn’t want there to be blood, and he’s just going to have to steel himself for the possibility. For a moment he wants to cover his mouth, but then he remembers that Richie spent a good portion of their childhood watching him hock loogies off cliffs. He rolls his eyes at himself and spits into the tissue.

It’s green. Not red, not black, not dark brown. Just good old anaerobic bacteria, and getting lighter every day.

He almost dissolves in relief. “Garbage?” he asks, and Richie twists around to pick up the garbage can and holds it out. Eddie tries to throw, but he misses and bounces the tissue off Richie like he’s a backboard.

“What is that, two points?” Richie asks.

“I’m fucking hospitalized, it’s infinite points.”

“Well, everything’s made up and the points don’t matter,” Richie says good-naturedly, and sets the garbage can back down.

Eddie waits for a moment to see what he’s going to do, but Richie keeps standing there. Eddie waits for him to say or do something, but instead he just remains still, his hands tucked defensively in his pockets.

“Did you break your phone?” Eddie asks, when the silence gets too long.

Richie seems to snap back to life, immediately rounding the corner of the bed again and stooping to pick up his phone.

“Do not look at any of the bags!” Eddie says immediately, because there’s not just a bag of his chest fluid down there, he’s pretty sure there’s a bag of his urine.

“You’ve been asleep for a while, dude, I have seen the bags.” Richie stands up and holds up his phone, gleeful. The screen is undamaged.

“That fucker dropped you seven feet and your phone’s fine,” Eddie mutters. “Mine’s at the bottom of the sewers.”

“Yeah, well, you got the short end of the stick—which is appropriate, because all ends of your stick are short.”

“You fucking wish,” Eddie shoots back automatically, and then realizes what he’s said and blushes.

Richie raises his eyebrows dubiously and throws himself back down into the chair. “I don’t know, man, you’ve been asleep for long enough for me to make an Instagram completely dedicated to your catheter.”

Of all the things Richie could talk about, Eddie’s catheter is not quite the absolute bottom of the list, but it’s definitely low. Eddie stares at him. “What?”

“Very popular. Couple thousand followers.”

“What?” He sits up again, resisting the urge to shield himself with his hands, because he’s under the blanket. “What does that mean? Richie?”

Richie drops his phone into his pocket and holds up both hands. “I’m kidding, I’m kidding. I don’t know how the fuck to make an Instagram, I’m old.”

“What the _fuck_?”

He can recognize that Richie’s trying to re-establish their old pattern, but Eddie’s freaked out a little. Kind of stripped raw, actually. The blanket feels too thin, and he’s still wearing a hospital gown, every time he gets up from bed his ass is hanging out because nobody has seen fit to give him underwear since he woke up, and he can only hope they’ve burned his clothes as medical waste, and he’s _so fucking cold_.

Richie looks like he’s losing his confidence too. His eyes are widening a little, his expression turning softer at the edges. “I wouldn’t,” he says. “You know I wouldn’t, right?”

Eddie relaxes a little bit but braces himself on the safety rail. “Why are you being such an asshole?”

He looks surprised, but he asks, “You have met me, right? No serious memory loss with the injury?”

“Not to me, you dick,” he says. “To Stan. To Mike. Probably to Bill, but he didn’t complain about anything specific.”

Richie looks at him for a moment, his chin lowering and his eyes sharpening into a glare. “No serious memory loss? With the injury?” he repeats.

“Nuh-uh,” Eddie says, trying to shut that shit down. “I’m not pissed at them. And you didn’t get hurt, so I don’t see why you are.”

“You—” Richie’s mouth opens and closes. _We’ll be seventy years old, asshole!_ He lowers his gaze to his knees again. “How’re your ribs?” he asks.

Eddie blinks once or twice, then taps experimentally at his own chest.

_“Jesus,”_ Richie manages. Eddie looks up. The expression Richie’s giving him is genuinely horrified.

“It doesn’t hurt,” he says. “I’m bandaged to hell and back.”

“Christ,” Richie says. His lips have gone weirdly white, and he swallows once.

Eddie waits and then asks, “Are you going to throw up?”

“I have emotional responses other than throwing up,” Richie says, averting his gaze.

“Mm. Not an answer.”

Richie flips him off.

Eddie laughs. “I’ll take that.” He holds one hand braced on his ribs, but he really doesn’t feel much under the bandages. If Richie makes him laugh incoherently, for a long period of time, he’s going to hurt. But that used to happen, he thinks. He used to be thirteen years old and laughing with his best friends, his diaphragm aching because they’d been together all day and he’d laughed more than he talked.

Richie leans all the way back in his chair and watches Eddie contemplatively. He’s very aware of the patchy beard growing in on his face, more on his chin than on his cheeks—which is something of a mercy around the stab wound on his face—and the way he must look wizened and shriveled in this bed, under the thin blanket. He’s self-conscious in a way he usually isn’t—not the usual things he’s self-conscious about.

“You ever broken a branch off a tree?” Richie asks him. “Or like, pulled one up by the roots, or something?”

Eddie stares at him. Richie’s prone to nonsequiturs, but he’s completely left in the dust on this one. “No,” he says. “Not a lot of lawn care in the city. Or, uh. Botany. Arboreal care.”

“Arboreal care,” Richie repeats. And then, quieter, almost as though to himself: “God.”

“What?”

He shakes his head. “Nothing. I just… forgot how much you sound like you.”

It almost hurts, and Eddie only barely understands why.

“Well, I should hope so,” he says. “Why?”

Richie considers and then says, “No reason.”

* * *

About eighteen hours after Eddie is congratulated on his intact intestines and granted Jell-O rights, certain events resume.

Sarah comes in when he rings and is polite about his visible discomfort. She’s overheard enough of his conversations with Richie during visiting hours—which these are not, Eddie is thankful for—that she seems perfectly unconcerned about professionalism when she asks, “Mr. Kaspbrak, would you say you’ve got to poop?”

Eddie wishes the clown had killed him.

He doesn’t, really, but he wishes to be as insensate in those lost hours immediately after his surgeries, where people talked to him and he remembers none of if. He covers both eyes with his hands and manages, “Yes.”

“Good!” Sarah says, with more enthusiasm than anyone has shown for Eddie’s bowel movements since he was two. One of the side effects of morphine is constipation. Eddie knows, generally, that this is a sign of good health and improvement, but then Sarah says the words that confirm his anxieties: “Would you prefer a male nurse to help you with the bedpan?”

Eddie considers. He supposes he’s supposed to feel more comfortable with his ass out in front of someone who also has a penis. But there are a lot of expectations and general assumptions Eddie has failed to meet over the years, and now he’s decided not to feel bad about it. At this point, he doesn’t think the gender of the nurse will make a difference.

“I will give you ten thousand dollars if you walk me to a toilet instead of a bedpan,” he mutters, lowering his hands so Sarah can see how dead his eyes must look.

Sarah immediately looks dubious. “You remember what Dr. Fox said about falling?”

“I promise not to fall off the toilet.”

“Oh, well, if you promise.” She smiles at her little joke, but she’s clearly thinking ahead. “I’ll have to see if anyone else is free to help you walk down to the bathroom, unless you think you can wait until the hour.”

“I can wait,” Eddie says immediately. He’s thinking of those rats that drowned in a bucket, who survived twice as long when they believed that someone was coming to save him.

Sarah gives him an assessing glance, like she can determine the capacity of his gastrointestinal system by looking at him, and says, “I’ll see if Nathan’s free. And Mr. Kaspbrak, I’m not allowed to accept bribes.”

Nathan is not free, and as if turns out Eddie cannot wait until the hour. The urge to evacuate his bowels fades after some time, which perplexes him, and then the nausea arrives, and then he throws up. He manages to twist to the side to puke off the bed, but it’s still onto the floor, and he feels awful as Sarah comes by to help clean up.

“Now will you use the bedpan?” she asks him, her expression far less judgmental than she could be. Less than Eddie probably deserves.

“Please don’t add insult to injury,” Eddie murmurs from where he’s curled on the pillows. They are so flat that they feel like they are filled with cotton balls only, and he’s miserable.

He still counts it as a victory when he makes it to his scheduled walk to prevent blood clots and Sarah and Nathan (tall, black, ex-military, sci-fi fan) help escort him to the hall bathroom. Even though he falls asleep sitting up on the toilet, like a drunk.

Nathan is turned politely with his back to him, but he hears when Eddie slumps back and rocks the porcelain tank. “Mr. Kaspbrak?”

“It’s been a long day,” Eddie allows.

“I think you’ve earned one,” Nathan allows, and waits while it takes Eddie maybe twice as long as it should for him to wipe his own ass, and carefully helps Eddie to a standing position so he can walk over and wash his hands. The catheter came out today, and his penis hurts, and his chest hurts. As he scrubs his hands in the hot water, very aware of his ass in the wind, Nathan asks, “Have you thought about assistance once you’re discharged?”

Eddie blinks. “What?”

Nathan’s face remains very calm in the mirror over Eddie’s shoulder. “Someone to help you when you’re back home? Take care of things in the house while your mobility’s restricted, run errands before you’re good to drive, pick up your scrips, get you water?”

Intellectually Eddie knew he wasn’t allowed to drive—he’s allowed to do precious little—but the reminder of how _trapped_ he is closes down on him like jaws. He tries not to think about it. “Like a nurse?”

“Like a nurse,” Nathan says. “Or like a family member, a close friend—someone who can stay with you while you recover and do your PT, you know.”

Someone to clean up his vomit and help him to the bathroom. Eddie turns off the tap and stares at the drain. “I’d rather it be a nurse,” he says. He feels less horrible about the idea of assistance from someone who chose it as a job, from someone who’s getting paid to take care of him. He can’t imagine asking anyone to help him out of the goodness of their heart.

“I can recommend some agencies,” Nathan offers.

“Are any of them in New York?” Eddie asks dully.

“No,” he says. “Sorry, I’ve been here since I was like five, I’m a local boy.”

So with that on his mind, he’s just a delight by the time Richie arrives when visiting hours open at seven, as he promised. Apparently hours are extended on Saturdays and Sundays, visitors being kicked out at seven PM instead of five. Eddie’s morphine dosage has been reduced and he’s cranky and unshaven and itchy and achy by the time Richie comes in, hair still wet from the shower and holding a Starbucks cup.

“Fuck you,” Eddie greets him.

Richie peers at Eddie over his glasses, a gesture that makes him look weirdly studious. “Fuck you too, sugah,” he says in a sunny Southern drawl.

Eddie resists the urge to pull a pillow over his own face like a child.

“Bill still remembers us,” Richie says. “He’s been texting. If that’s what pissed you off. Unless someone finally broke it to you that you have a hole through your chest, because let me tell you, sitting on that has not been easy.”

Eddie turns his head far enough into the pillowcase to roar into it a little. Immediately afterward there is a moment of silence.

“Well,” Richie says. “That was adorable.”

And now Eddie wants to throw something at him. He’s just regressing down into thirteen years old again, ready to drown Richie in the quarry.

“I’m so fucking itchy,” he says, because it’s not just his hair, or even his stitches; it’s an itch so deep in his chest he imagines it rests on his heart. “And I’m disgusting, and I puked on the floor and I _hate_ puking, and I don’t want to go back to New York.”

Richie says nothing for long moments, and then he sits down in the chair. Eddie can hear the faint scrape of its metal legs on the linoleum as he jostles it a bit.

“Like, at all?”

“No,” Eddie says, because he feels bad and he’s being childish and everywhere in the world is a stupid place full of stupid people. He had kind of naïvely hoped that Richie’s presence would take his mind off it, make him feel better, but his skin is _crawling_.

“I hate to break this to you, but you left something kind of important in New York.”

“Car needs work anyway,” Eddie replies automatically, muffled by the cheap pillow.

“...Oh my dear sweet lord,” Richie says slowly.

“I wrecked when Mike called me.”

“I… We’re gonna get into that, because you reek of safe driving discounts, but I was talking about your wife, genius.”

Ah, fuck.

“Oh,” Eddie says.

Richie scoffs. “Yeah, ‘oh.’”

And that doesn’t make him feel much better. If life is going on—bodies are working, days are passing, Bill is flying back to England—Eddie’s going to have to call Myra sooner rather than later. The longer he puts it off, the worse it’s going to be. But that doesn’t make the idea any more appealing.

Eddie sits up and scowls at Richie, like it’s his fault that there’s a world outside this hospital room but it’s not the one that he wants.

“I just want to take a shower,” he says. His voice comes out a little more raw and broken than he expected. It’s too vulnerable. Immediately he wants to reel the words back in.

Richie looks at him for a long moment, black eyes painfully sympathetic. Then he pulls his phone out of his pocket and starts tapping away at it with his free hand. Eddie assumes that Richie’s giving him the opportunity to get a grip on himself, so he tries to, taking deep breaths and trying to take comfort in the pain the way he did earlier, when he was drugged a little more. It works, but only barely. Eddie remembers that he has a body, and it’s difficult to focus on other things when it’s occupying so much of his conscious attention. This must be the principle behind meditation, behind yoga. It helps. Maybe he should take up yoga. Once the air vent cut through his chest is better and he can raise his arms above his head again, that is.

“Right.” Richie stands up. “Do you trust me?”

Eddie tries to convey _fuck you_ again, but with just his eyes. “Are you gonna make me regret it?”

“I heard the ‘yes’ in there.” He claps his hands together. “I’ll be back, okay?”

Eddie stares at him. Being in the hospital fills up all his brain with its humming sounds and weird smells and constant low-level aching pain. But it’s so boring at the same time—excruciating to try to focus on, but impossible to forget long enough to think about something else. And Richie is just leaving?

“Don’t look at me like that, it’s extended hours, you’ll still get your usual dose of Trashmouth.” Richie smiles, tilts his head back to drain his coffee cup in several gulps, and then stoops to Eddie’s level. Before Eddie knows what’s happening, Richie has planted a kiss into his greasy hair and straightened up again. “Be good. Don’t make anyone cry.” And he just leaves.

But that’s plenty distracting. Eddie becomes almost immediately consumed with the kiss—the audible little click of his lips atop his head—and then the one he gave Eddie when he woke up. The latter could be excused by sheer relief that Eddie is alive at all, but he has no idea what to make of this one. Typical Richie Tozier audacity? Latent signaling? What does it mean when a guy brings up your wife and then kisses you on the head in the same conversation? What does it mean when he calls you _sweetheart_ and _sugar_ , but also says _genius_ like he means _you have the IQ of a candy bracelet_?

Sarah looks in on him. “Where’d your guest go?”

“He asked me if I trusted him and then he bailed, so probably to commit a crime,” Eddie replies.

She laughs, but then she doesn’t know what they get up to.

* * *

Richie comes back just over an hour later, walking into the room without hesitation as if he’s just been down the hall getting something out of the vending machine.

Eddie is vomiting into a kidney dish. “Get out!” he snaps as best he can, but his words are slippery with acid.

Tracy, who has the misfortunate job of holding the kidney dish, tries to calm him with a murmured, “Easy.”

Vomiting into a kidney dish is not easy. Eddie is accustomed to—on the rare occasions he has had to throw up in his life—using either a toilet bowl or a garbage can, and the perimeters of those are much more forgiving. Tracy seems to expect him to simply sit there and open his mouth and be sick, instead of lowering his head and aiming, and if Eddie had the strength to do anything other than hold himself up, he’d hate it. The immobility of it, the expected helplessness.

He doesn’t look at Richie, but he knows that Richie is not getting out; he can hear the rustle of the plastic bag as Richie throws himself down into the visitor’s chair again. Between convulsions Eddie gasps out, “If you—sympathy vomit—”

Richie is loud in his response, so Eddie can hear it even as his ears pop and crackle. “Sorry, nothing about you grosses me out anymore, no danger there.”

“Fucking—liar,” Eddie manages, and pants. Tracy sets the one kidney dish down on the countertop and picks up a second one. Eddie focuses on not puking anymore. He dry-heaves once or twice, but tries to stop his stomach seizing. “I’m good,” he tells Tracy.

“Okay,” she says, and gets him a tiny cup of water to rinse his mouth out.

Richie is sitting in the chair with his feet drawn up to the seat, his chin on his knees, looking like he’s a seven-year-old watching Saturday morning cartoons. Eddie hates him a little. He doesn’t, but he does, a little. Richie’s arm is wrapped loosely around his leg, and the plastic bag hangs down past his feet.

Richie got tall first. Eddie remembers that. Spiky tall, like a grasshopper. It’s the width that’s new.

Fucker.

Eddie spits the oddly sweet water into the second kidney dish and then leans back on the pillows.

“On your side,” Tracy says.

“I know.” Eddie supposes he can’t blame her for not wanting him to aspirate on his own vomit, after all the trouble this hospital has expended to save his life. He rolls onto his side slightly and glares at Richie.

Richie opens his mouth and then makes a clicking sound. “So, uh, do you want me to...?”

Eddie continues glaring, just waiting.

“…Draw you like one of my French girls?” Richie finishes.

“ _Fuck_ you,” Eddie says. He thinks he can hear Tracy chuckling from where she’s cleaning up.

Richie unfolds his miles of legs and leans back in his chair, waving his free hand. In a French accent he asks, “In your portrait, sir, would you like the vomit to be orange or pink?”

Eddie stares at him. Did Richie get good at accents at some point? What the fuck? “What the fuck?” he says out loud.

“Mr. Tozier, I’m going to have to ask you not to agitate the patient,” Tracy says.

“Ah, madame, you wound me.”

“I’ll wound you,” Eddie says.

Richie grins. “If you can get up from the bed to hit me, I’ll let you. Come on.” He tilts his head back, presenting his chin for a sock in the jaw.

Eddie grips the safety rail and considers whether he could lean over to reach him.

“Absolutely not,” Tracy says.

Eddie releases the safety rail and wraps both arms around the pillow, and sulks.

“Cute,” says Richie.

Eddie puts his knuckles to his mouth and takes a deep breath in. He can’t keep doing this to him. He can’t be oblivious to what he’s doing, anyway, he’s just…

“Are you sweating?” Tracy asks.

Of course he’s sweating. He’s cold and he just puked his guts out and now he’s all clammy. “Yes,” he replies flatly.

“Does it itch?”

Eddie can’t tell what’s actual itching and what’s phantom skin-crawling from the morphine. “Not sure.” He knows what she’s going to say.

“Okay.” She smiles pleasantly at him. “We’re going to wipe you down, just to be sure.”

He doesn’t want to argue with Tracy, so he just looks at Richie. “Go.”

Richie’s expression switches quickly from entertained to surprised. “Why?”

“Because I said so.”

“Seriously, why?”

Eddie fires back with what he has. “Why’d you ask me about trees?”

Richie shakes his head, mouth puckering into a grimace. “Uh-uh, Eds, one of these things is not like the other.”

“Because I don’t want you here, all right?” Eddie says.

Tracy interrupts. “Mr. Tozier.”

“Here comes the half-nelson,” Richie says, and gets up. He gives Eddie an obsequious half-bow. “Can I come back later, or am I banished before you even get to see your presents?”

“Just—” Eddie half sits up, still feeling shaky and nauseous. “Go away, I don’t want you to see me naked.”

Richie gives him a look so dry it could cause brushfires in California. “Unless they’re getting your dick out—”

“Mr. Tozier,” Tracy repeats, her voice sharper. Her hand rests on the countertop. “The patient has made a request. You can follow through with it, or I can call security.”

Richie looks genuinely surprised. _“Jesus,_ purple haze, I’m going.”

“You don’t have to call security,” Eddie says quickly. He’s not that angry.

But Richie leaves, taking his plastic bag with him.

Eddie waits, sitting up, with one hand braced on the safety rail and his other fist on his forehead, as Tracy wipes the sweat off the stitches in his back.

“Sorry,” he says to her.

“For what?”

“Him,” he says, and then sighs. “Me.”

Tracy huffs a laugh that he feels on the back of his head. “That was mild. Don’t worry about it.” She puts a new waterproof bandage across his stitches—he recognizes the plasticky grip—and then says, “All right, doing the front now, don’t look.”

“Not looking.” He shifts around so that she has better access to his incision and stares determinedly past her shoulder. He can see the sunlight reflecting off her purple hair. “Do you like your job?”

She laughs. “Most of the time.” The cloth is just as cold as the rest of the room. Eddie feels weirdly self-conscious about his nipples. “Do you like your job?”

Eddie thinks about it. Really tries to think about it. To find something about his job that he’s excited to do. He likes the feeling of closing a spreadsheet, when it’s done; but it’s still tempered with the gnawing anxiety of wondering whether he’s missed something. At this point in his career, he very rarely misses things, but it’s always a possibility.

“I don’t know,” he admits.

“What do you do?”

“I’m a risk analyst,” he says.

Tracy whistles.

Eddie smiles. “Yeah, I know.”

“What does that even mean?”

“It’s, uh, economic risk,” he says. “Businesses need someone to tell them whether an investment’s a good idea, whether a new marketing campaign is a good idea. Not very exciting.”

“Does it pay?”

“Enough,” Eddie says. It was enough, then, to collect a paycheck for work he was good at and take it home and spend it on groceries and bills. Enough to make him keep going back. Enough to get him out of bed every day.

He can’t get out of bed now.

Tracy affixes the second plaster and then holds up the roll of gauze bandage. “Take a normal breath.”

“Well, you know I can’t do that now,” Eddie says, breathing manually.

Tracy laughs.

* * *

Richie comes back forty-five minutes after Eddie kicked him out. Eddie’s not exactly checking the clock, but there’s very little to do. Tracy offered him a book of crossword puzzles, but Eddie’s struggled enough with trying to use his Jell-O spoon. He doesn’t want to see how his right hand does with a pencil. It’s the medical dexterity equivalent of not looking at your bank account balance and hoping everything’s okay.

When he comes in he has one hand over his eyes. “Are you decent?”

“Fuck you,” Eddie says.

“That’s not an answer, Eddie, I’m a Victorian lady, I need to know whether I’m going to see your ankles and just drop dead.”

“You’re an asshole, is what you are.” Eddie, hospital gown tied around his neck and everything, watches Richie performing a dramatic version of Blind-Man’s Bluff between the doorway and the chairs. He broke his glasses doing that, once, back in like second grade, maybe third. Wandering around with his eyes shut and walked straight off the play equipment, banged his face on the fireman’s pole.

“Okay, I’m putting my hand down,” Richie says, and lowers it with the speed of dripping molasses. His eyes are still scrunched shut. “I’m putting my hand down, Eddie. Can you see? I can’t see if you’re looking. Are you looking?”

“Didn’t you break your glasses doing that once?” Eddie asks. “In ’83?”

Richie drops the gag and opens his eyes, shrugging. “If I wasn’t breaking ’em, someone else was doing it for me.” He looks almost proud of the fact, his shoulders squared. Suddenly he’s taking up a lot of space in the room. He holds up the Target bag. “Do you want to see your surprise, or not?”

Just like that? Eddie’s thrown by the switching gears. Normally when Richie finds a weakness he turns into a terrier, worrying it and worrying it until it no longer means anything. What the hell did he buy that he’s so excited about?

“Fine,” Eddie says.

“Do you want to guess?”

Eddie gives him a flat look and says, half-heartedly, “A live cockroach.”

“A—” Richie interrupts himself laughing and then nods. “Yeah, they sell live cockroaches at Target.”

“I knew it. You’re so predictable.”

“Predict this, motherfucker,” Richie says, and pulls a purple bottle out of the plastic bag like he’s pulling a rabbit out of a hat. It looks like fancy sunscreen. “Ta-da!”

Eddie stares at him. “The hell is that?”

“Well, I googled ‘wash hair no water,’ and it turns out that dry shampoo is a thing that exists,” Richie says. He waves the bottle around. “Made with, like, clay and shit. Well, not shit. But you spray it in, you mush it around, you brush it out. Clean hair. Hospital bed.” He holds the bottle up like he’s going to toss it to Eddie.

“Do not throw that at me, I cannot catch.”

“You could never catch.”

“I can’t lift my arms, you dick.”

“Excuses, excuses.” But he doesn’t throw the bottle of dry shampoo.

Eddie holds his left arm out as far as the safety rail and waits for Richie to put it in his hand. He does, not touching Richie’s fingers as they make the exchange. Instead he focuses on reading the ingredients and the instructions.

His scalp itches. A lot, now that he’s thinking about it. More than the rest of his skin, which means it’s probably not a side-effect of either the morphine or healing from major surgery.

Richie is watching his face and its burgeoning relief. “I figured you’d go apeshit over carcinogens and aerosols and everything,” he says, sounding proud of himself. He sits down on the chair and looks at Eddie with the casual confidence of a cat who has just brought its owner something dead.

“I’m going apeshit over my oily scalp,” Eddie grumbles. “I’m gonna have dandruff, and I’m breaking out like a fucking teenager because they don’t change the pillowcases every day.”

“You’re not breaking out,” Richie says.

“I am.” It’s one of the things Eddie noticed when he was holding himself up by the sink in the bathroom down the hall, staring into the mirror and wondering how this became his life.

Richie frowns, squints, leans all the way forward, and then says, “Oh, yeah,” with the slow realization of a man discovering something right in front of him. He reaches out and Eddie barely notices what he’s doing until one finger curls across his cheek, just a gentle brush. Eddie fumbles the bottle of shampoo. “I didn’t notice,” Richie says casually.

He’s doing this on purpose. Is he doing this on purpose? He has to be doing this on purpose. Right? Eddie’s skin prickles. “Well, don’t _touch_ it, you’ll make it worse!”

Richie withdraws his hand but remains in that close lean. “Probably just because you need to shave,” he says. “You know, like when you have a beard and you get all dry.”

“I don’t know because I don’t wear a beard, jackass,” Eddie mutters. It’s maybe a little more vehement than he would otherwise be, but he’s tired of fending off offers of help with it, and it took him a really long time to get to the point where he can grow a full beard. It still comes in awkward on his cheeks, and there are two spots below his lower lip where hair refuses to grow at all, and he’s never liked shaving below his nose.

Richie, on the other hand, has consistent scruff that adds to his air of perpetual dishevelment. If Eddie reached out and brushed a finger across Richie’s cheek, it would be rough. It would scratch.

“I’m sure they can get a mirror in here if you want to shave,” Richie says. “Like old-fashioned barbershop rules. They drag therapy animals through here, I’m sure a therapy barber is a thing.”

They have therapy animals here? There’s animal dander in this hospital? Eddie feels himself lock up in panic and consciously unclenches his grip on the bottle, trying to focus on something other than allergies he probably doesn’t have or fantasizing about touching Richie’s face.

“I don’t want to shave,” he says, for what he hopes is the last time. “I just want clean hair before I peel off my own scalp.”

Richie gives him a sweeping _after-you_ gesture. “I don’t know if you’re allowed to have aerosols in here, actually, so do it fast.”

Oh.

“I don’t have a brush,” Eddie says.

Richie produces a brush from the bag. Eddie feels a prickle at his temples and wonders if he’s sweating. He should be too cold in here to sweat.

“I—can’t lift my arms over my head,” he admits, and holds the bottle back out to Richie. “Thanks, though. It was a nice thought.”

Richie does not take the bottle, just stares at him while gnawing the inside of his own cheek, fuchsia hairbrush still held in his free hand.

He can see the wheels turning behind Richie’s eyes. “No,” Eddie says.

“No?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“It’s a complete fucking sentence, Richie.” He gestures a little more vehemently with the shampoo bottle and, when Richie doesn’t take it from him, drops the bottle between his hip and the safety rail and twists away from him. Slowly, though, because sudden movements hurt his chest.

“Clean hair,” Richie says.

“No.”

His tone turns wheedling: “Clean hair.”

Oh god, is Eddie blushing? He might be blushing. “No.”

“Eddie.” Coaxing now: _“Eddie.”_

“Do not make me throw you out again.”

“Seriously?” Richie demands, all sugar gone now and just mad again. “Look, man, I’m not a doctor, I can do like very few things to help you, but this is one of them.”

“I don’t—” He grimaces. It wouldn’t be accurate to say that Eddie doesn’t need help, because he does need help, and he hates it. But he also has help, in the form of several trained nurses who are receiving pay for what they’re doing and have several other patients besides. It doesn’t mean anything to them, that Eddie Kaspbrak in Room 15 needs someone (usually multiple someones) to take his weight on his walks every two hours, or is so constipated from morphine use that he keeps throwing up, and still insists on walking to the bathroom anyway. They’ve seen worse. Eddie’s not even a blip on their radars.

Richie, though—Richie doesn’t have to help him. Richie’s just a guy whose friend got hurt, and the fact that he’s still hanging around here while Eddie’s being a very large toddler still throws Eddie for something of a loop. Eddie doesn’t want to need help, doesn’t want to be taken care of, doesn’t want any of that—and he doesn’t want Richie to feel obligated to offer to help either.

But saying any of that out loud to Richie is _way_ too intense for like nine in the goddamn morning, and the way that Eddie’s throat is tight makes him unsure about whether he’d go straight into an asth— _panic_ attack, or whether he’d just cry. And both of those sound like the worst possible option at the same time.

He looks down at the purple bottle, its plastic cap, its pointed nozzle.

“I want to be able to wash my own hair,” he mutters.

Richie replies immediately, “Yeah, but you can’t.”

It stings. Like, Eddie’s ears ring a little bit, the way they did when he was little and someone swore in front of him, followed immediately by his mother’s bawling the offender out.

“What you can do, however, is get your old pal Trashmouth to make himself useful,” Richie says, tone just as chipper and bright. “And then you’ll have one less thing grating on you here. I mean—not me, I’m going to continue grating on you. But, like, you’ll have clean hair.”

Eddie thinks about it, considering. Richie’s going to have to touch him. Actually, Richie is _asking_ to touch him, to help him clean himself up, to—put his hands all through Eddie’s hair.

“And,” Richie says, “I didn’t go out and buy this shit to wave it in your face and then yank it away from you. Come on, like, I made this mess.”

“You did not make this mess, my scalp made this mess,” Eddie says.

“Oh? One thing in the world that isn’t my fault? That’s nice.” When Eddie glances up at him, Richie’s grinning a little, eyes bright and mouth stretched wide in a parody of wholesomeness.

Richie’s too big to be cute. But like, he is, a little. Ghost of the frog-faced kid he was, beaming at Eddie from the other side of the hospital room.

“Okay,” Eddie says.

Richie’s smile opens to show teeth. “Okay?”

“Yes, fine, don’t make it weird.” He fumbles down with his left hand and looks away from Richie. It takes him two attempts to find the bottle, but he thrusts it blindly at him. Sweat prickles at the nape of his neck, and Tracy would be mad at him for it.

Richie plucks the bottle out of his hand. “Can’t help it, anything I do is by definition weird, and anything _you_ do is definitely weird, so… net weirdness.” Eddie glances back up at him to find Richie is reading the instructions on the bottle, sliding his glasses down to the end of his nose to peer over them.

“You can’t read with your glasses on?”

“Just be happy I can read at all,” Richie replies immediately without looking up.

“Aren’t they—like, bifocals?”

He looks up for that one, grinning. “Bifocals? How old do you think I am, seriously?” He drops his gaze back to the bottle, face sobering, and says absently, “God, what black magic is this? Farrah Fawcett, eat your heart out.” He grimaces and then starts shaking the bottle aggressively. Eddie hears a metallic click from within its depths. “Seriously, this isn’t about to burst into flames, is it?”

Eddie squints at the little bottle in his hand, trying to figure out what the hell Richie is talking about. “Are you… thinking about open flame around oxygen tanks?” he guesses.

Richie’s expression clears immediately. “ _Yes_ , that’s it. Specifically guns, though, I saw this show one time where there was a shoot-out during bingo night at a retirement home. Okay. I feel a lot better now that I’m not about to kill you.”

There are a lot of things Eddie could pick at from that one, but he just asks, “You thought that this might kill me, and you were _still_ trying to talk me into it?”

“Look, I don’t understand hair care, I’ve been using three-in-one shampoo, conditioner, and body wash my entire adult life.” He stops shaking the can. “Is that good enough?”

“Your personal hygiene? Absolutely not.” Richie had such beautiful hair when they were kids, all those curls. Eddie eyes his hair now, feeling something like grief. It’s not that Richie’s hair looks _bad_ , per se, but he does look like he has never brushed his hair in his life.

“Your aerosolized clay, thanks,” Richie says pointedly, like he’s not delighted that Eddie took the joke he set him up for. “Is there a requisite hundred-and-fifty shakes before I can spray you, or what?”

“You read the instructions.”

“You also read the instructions! You committed the instructions to memory! If I gave you a stone tablet and a chisel, you could engrave those fuckers just off the top of your head.”

“God, it’s fine, Richie.”

“Okay.”

And then Richie stands up, and Eddie’s whole limbic system does something weird.

Gets fuzzy around the edges, if that makes sense. Eddie is suddenly intensely aware of his body and the space he takes up in the hospital bed and how he’s still forced into a recline. It feels like the core of him is concentrated, somehow. Intense to make up for the way he can no longer feel his fingers or toes.

“Lean your head a little bit forward,” Richie says.

Eddie closes his eyes, takes a deep breath that aches, and holds it. He tilts his head forward so Richie can get the back of his head. He feels stiff as driftwood, as if he’s never leaned in his life. His body is a marionette and he's a puppeteer who has no idea what the fuck he's doing.

He almost startles at the touch over his eyebrows, as Richie lays the side of his hand there. “Trying not to blind you,” he says. Eddie opens his eyes reflexively, Richie’s palm and fingers so close they’re fuzzy in his peripheral vision, Richie’s thumb pressed to Eddie’s temple. He’s shielding Eddie’s eyes. Eddie closes them again. “Ready?” Richie asks.

Eddie says, “Ready,” and does not breathe in.

The bottle hisses. Eddie feels faint coldness on his scalp, a faint shift in pressure as something almost weightless lands on his hair. Hair strands don’t have nerve endings, but his scalp is trying to feel _something_. He can feel the trajectory, the way Richie moves his hand on Eddie’s forehead slightly as he shifts his weight to get the far side of his head, to work back around to above his other ear, to go over the part in Eddie’s hair.

Richie lifts his hand away. Clear cold spots stand out above Eddie’s brows where he’s no longer touching him.

“Oh god, you look like the kid who goes as Doc from _Back to the Future_ for Halloween,” he says. “Like the kids who spray their hair gray. What even is this?” He doesn’t touch Eddie’s scalp as he combs through Eddie’s hair, but the bottle hushes again as he exposes new roots and coats them. Eddie feels like a book and Richie’s turning his pages.

“It absorbs the oil,” Eddie says, hoping that’s all that it is.

The hissing of the bottle stops. “Okay,” Richie says.

Eddie lifts his hands to the back of his neck and scrubs with his fingers as high as he can reach. He can get his elbows to a certain height without his shoulders rebelling. He doesn’t know why the tops of his shoulders are involved in a chest injury, but they have made it clear plenty of times that they’re on strike until he provides better working conditions. He’s not sure what to do about the numbness, the prickling, the nonresponsiveness of his right hand.

“Does it itch?” Richie asks, sounding nonplussed, and then: “Oh shit, did I buy itching powder by mistake?”

Eddie knows for a fact that Richie did not buy itching powder, but because Richie has a history of buying sneezing powder, a little part of Eddie’s brain still gets nervous about it. “I’m rubbing it in.”

Richie tosses the bottle onto the plastic chair. It rolls back off the seat, knocks into the wall, and then falls to the floor. “Whoops,” Richie says, and then cracks his knuckles dramatically.

The sudden flood of saliva under Eddie’s tongue is… startling. He has to swallow against it.

“All right, get ready to look like a Trollz doll.”

Eddie rolls his eyes, but Richie flattens his palms to the crown of Eddie’s head and smears them around.

“That’s not—it’s _shampoo_ , Richie, you’re just messing up my hair.” And Richie’s definitely fucking with him.

“Oh, am I doing it wrong?” Richie asks dryly. “Is this not the standard dry-shampoo application technique?” His hands shift and his knuckles dig into Eddie’s scalp. Eddie instinctively recoils like he’s getting noogied, but Richie stops immediately. Then he drags his fingertips from Eddie’s hairline to the back of his head.

Eddie’s shoulders want to jump up somewhere around his ears, he’s so tense. Fortunately, his broken body will not let him. “What are you doing?”

“Does it hurt?”

“No.” He cringes. “Is my hair super gross?”

“Super gross,” Richie agrees pleasantly, which makes Eddie feel better than if he had tried to soften the blow. “It’s like they pulled you out of a sewer and straight into surgery.”

“Oh, Jesus,” Eddie says. “Please tell me that someone has washed my hair in all this bullshit.”

Richie’s nails scratch across his scalp and Eddie’s eyes flutter shut, like Richie has discovered a cheat code to Eddie’s nervous system.

“Yeah, we took you out and hosed you down in the front yard before we called the ambulance.”

“Ha fucking ha.”

“I mean, Stan wasn’t going for it, but I know you, all right, I knew ‘Eddie would rather die clean than live dirty.’”

“Fuck you,” Eddie says, because otherwise he’s going to have to explain to Richie about his new life philosophy. And Richie’s fingers are making small spirals across the top of Eddie’s head, which for some reason isn’t conducive to talking. He swallows again. “Are you moonlighting as a hairdresser?” His voice comes out lower than he expected.

Richie keeps making little circles on his scalp. “Yeah, people absolutely trust me enough to put their personal styling into my hands,” he says, as though Eddie isn’t doing just that. His fingers sink into the hair at the nape of Eddie’s neck, and then he pushes his fingers forward toward the crown of Eddie’s head. His nails score the back of Eddie’s skull.

It feels… really good. Like, really good. He keeps trying to open his eyes but they want to stay closed.

“It’s the homeless raccoon look,” Richie goes on. “Really sells them on me.”

He massages on either side of Eddie’s head, stroking from his temples, down behind his ears, and then comes back up to make little circles again. Eddie’s still leaning forward slightly so Richie has access to the back of his head while he’s still upright in the hospital bed, and as Richie moves his head around he has to kind of compensate from his abdomen so Richie doesn’t just push him over. But. It’s nice.

“You good, Spaghetti?” Richie asks.

Eddie has a snappy answer somewhere, but then Richie’s thumbs push into the tendons on the back of his neck, and his comeback just wisps away into nothing.

“Mmm,” he says vaguely.

There’s a laugh in Richie’s voice when he asks, “What, no complaints?”

No, not really. Eddie kind of expected noogies and scrubbing at his hair and generally something abrasive but that would leave him feeling stinging but clean when Richie was through with him. He didn’t expect to be… lulled.

“For someone who’s been sleeping for like a week straight, you’re still the tensest motherfucker I’ve ever met.”

Both of his palms settle on either side of Eddie’s head. He moves them back and forth, loosely pulling at Eddie’s scalp and hair, more purposeful and less willfully disorderly than before.

“It’s the company,” Eddie says slowly. He did puke, like, recently. He’s kind of physically wiped out. It’s not surprising that Richie trying to be… relaxing? (Is Richie trying to be relaxing?) is kind of winding him down, making him realize how tired he is.

“Oh, are you also scared of the nurse with the huge arms?”

“Her arms are normal-sized,” Eddie says, because what he almost says is _You have huge arms_. He feels stupid, but he’s not that stupid yet.

Richie curls his fingers in Eddie’s hair and tugs lightly. It doesn’t hurt. The pull is gentle and relaxes almost immediately.

Eddie should tell Richie to stop fucking around, to brush the dry shampoo out of his hair and get it over with. Acts of hygiene are for maintenance, not… whatever Richie’s doing.

_Blissing Eddie the fuck out,_ is what he’s doing. His scalp is tingling where Richie’s nails raked over it.

Richie abandons any pretense of haircare and presses circles just behind Eddie’s ears, where it’s all skin and hopefully no shampoo. “Are you falling asleep?” he asks.

“Can’t,” he says without opening his eyes. “You’re running your mouth.”

“I have watched you sleep through my trashmouth, so I know that’s not true.”

Eddie doesn’t know why that surprises him, but he supposes it does, in a way. When he woke up this time Richie was silent—still talking, but he seemed to be careful not to wake Eddie. But the first time that Eddie woke up and Richie was there, he was running his mouth without concern about either disturbing Eddie or the lack of response.

“I heard you talking,” Eddie says.

Richie’s hands still. “Did you?”

There’s a note of tension in Richie’s voice that makes Eddie remember the first thing he said was _I love you_. So of course now he’s wondering what Richie said. What he said that he didn’t think Eddie would hear. And Eddie is just _starving_ to know, but when he tries to think back it’s like a dream filtering away.

Richie is still holding his head.

“About music,” he says, and then opens his eyes. “Right?”

Richie laughs once and then continues massaging behind Eddie’s ears. “Yeah. I tried to play music for you, but the nurses came by and yelled at me about ‘distracting the doctors’ and how ‘causing a disruption in a hospital is an act of domestic terrorism.’”

Eddie sputters. “You’re making that shit up.”

“I am,” Richie says. “One time in college I climbed on the roof of the local hospital and when security came to get me he threatened me with charges of domestic terrorism. I told him I didn’t think Rent-A-Cops were authorized to do that shit, that was the FBI or something. I was also high as balls at the time. Anyway.”

“You—” That’s a lot to try to pick apart. Eddie doesn’t know what to do with that.

“But like, there’s a music therapist who comes in and plays live guitar, and _that’s_ fine. _She_ can do whatever she wants, which seems to be rocking out to ‘You Are My Sunshine’ instead of things people _want_ to listen to.”

“Does anyone want to listen to your music?” Eddie asks, dryly, habitually combative.

“I have a lot of Spotify followers,” Richie says.

Eddie frowns. “Is that how Spotify works?”

“Yeah, I make playlists, people can see them, people can see what I’m listening to.”

“What’s your playlist for ‘long-lost friend in the ICU’?”

Richie laughs a little and releases him. There’s a faint ghost of pressure where he held Eddie’s head, and his head and neck feel… probably more relaxed than he’s felt in his entire adult life. Eddie is well aware of the medical advantages of massage, but he’s never been that comfortable being _touched_. Being half-dressed and forced into a recline with a near-stranger putting their hands on him was just out of the question for so long.

“If you want me to make you a mixed tape, you’re gonna have to work a little harder for that,” Richie says. Eddie opens his eyes to find Richie holding up the hairbrush. There’s still a price sticker on it. “Brace yourself.”

Eddie, instead of acknowledging the light threat that is hair styling by Richie Tozier, frowns. “Did you make me a mixed tape when we were kids?”

“I mean, knowing me? Probably,” Richie says indifferently. He steadies Eddie’s head with his left hand and starts brushing Eddie with his right.

Eddie briefly thinks about his bandages, about getting clay powder in his bedding and on his pillow and on his drainage shunt, but he’s wearing the hospital gown and the blanket is pulled up almost to his chest. It’s all covered. The anxiety serves no purpose.

And the teeth of the brush raking over his head feels really good, too. Sharp plastic.

“You don’t remember?” he asks.

Richie says, “You know how music is supposed to be one of those things that stays in your brain? I mean, I can remember the words to songs I haven’t listened to in years, just because I got fucking obsessed the first time I heard it.”

“Yeah,” Eddie says. That makes sense. Music is related to brain development, and that’s why suddenly there’s a market for classical music made just for babies. You can play certain types of music to plants to make them grow better. It’s a documented phenomenon. No wonder this hospital has a music therapist.

Eddie woke up because he remembered the words to “American Pie” in his sleep.

“There is _so much music_ I was into as a kid that I just forgot about,” Richie goes on. “I was listening to oldies. Not just the eighties, but like, the _fifties_. I was rocking out to the Bobby Day version of ‘Rockin’ Robin,’ not even the Michael Jackson one. I went in for all of my mom’s old records, and then the next time I heard them it was like—” He leans around Eddie and into his field of vision, gaze far away and dreamy, and mimes his own skull exploding. Then he goes back to brushing Eddie’s hair. “And I’m out here going, ‘Why the fuck do I know all these songs from yogurt commercials?”

“Yogurt commercials?” Eddie repeats uselessly.

“Yeah, they all end up in yogurt commercials sooner or later. ‘Hippy Hippy Shakes,’ ‘Yellow Polka Dot Bikini,’ it’s a whole marketing scheme. Maggie Tozier is their target audience.”

Eddie frowns. “Are your parents still alive?” he asks, stunned.

“Oh, do you want her number? Yeah, they’re still alive, fucker. In a retirement community in fucking Connecticut, playing bridge and going to wine night, Jesus, don’t ever let me get that old. My ma goes to Thirsty Thursday, I don’t even know what the fuck to do with that, it makes binge drinking uncool.”

A sinking, Maggie-Tozier-related horror is settling on Eddie. “I, uh, wouldn’t have said that about your mom if I knew—”

“Dude, is _necrophilia_ okay with you but homewrecking is not?” The brush whisks over the top of his head, businesslike. Eddie closes his eyes to keep filaments of dust and clay out of them. “I won’t tell her if you won’t, but like, I talked a _ton_ of shit about your mother, it’s only fair. I mean, to me, not to her.” His finger shift on Eddie’s head. Eddie feels like he’s in a hair salon. A hair salon that gets really weird Yelp reviews. “Uh, did your mom…?”

“2008,” Eddie replies dryly. “Pneumonia.”

Richie stills. “Shit, in this day and age?”

“No, in 2008.”

He goes back to brushing Eddie’s hair. “Oh, yes, the medical dark ages of 2008—man, your mom was up your ass about pneumonia literally all the time. You tried to convince me ‘walking pneumonia’ was a thing back in like ninth grade, do you remember?”

“Walking pneumonia is a thing, Richie.”

“No, it’s what you say when you have a chest cold but you’re mad that you still had to go to school.”

“Oh Jesus.” Eddie sighs through his nose. “She had idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis. Diagnosed in 2005. Her lungs basically turned to stone.”

Richie stops brushing again. _“Shit.”_

“So yeah, pneumonia. She was on the lung transplant list, but for some reason—” He rolls his eyes under his closed lids. “—the ruling body thought she wasn’t a great candidate. And there’s something kinda gruesome about hoping someone’s gonna wipe out on their motorcycle and go brain dead so your mom can take their lungs and continue bitching you out for the rest of—all time, I don’t know.”

Richie says nothing. The brush moves rhythmically over Eddie’s head.

“You still there, Rich?”

“Are you an organ donor?” Richie asks.

Eddie frowns a little deeper. “What?”

“They asked us. I mean, they were going to check your name and see if it was on the registry, but.”

“Yes, obviously I’m an organ donor.”

“Oh, _obviously_ ,” Richie coughs.

Eddie thinks about that, feeling the brush continue scraping over his head.

“You gave me blood,” he says after a moment.

He waits for the next stroke of the brush. It doesn’t come.

Richie takes a step back and picks up the empty plastic bag, turning away from Eddie and throwing the brush back into it and then crouching to pick up the bottle of shampoo.

For a moment Eddie has the horrifying impression that Richie’s packing up to leave, and Eddie can’t _stop him_ , and then he chokes down that particular anxiety. It’s his mother, roaring up out of him from eight years in the grave. Richie’s been camped out here and still came back after Eddie used his words and told him to get out. He’s not about to skip out of here because Eddie pointed out something _Richie_ did.

Richie’s knee pops alarmingly. “Shit,” he groans. Eddie stares at the plane of the leather jacket spread over his back.

“Are you okay?”

“No, I’m forty.” He groans again as he stands up, holding the purple bottle up in muted victory. “Yeah, I’m fine, I’m just—fucking trashing your hospital room, why not?” He drops the bottle in the back with a crinkle of plastic and then stretches, arms up over his head and everything.

The hem of his shirt lifts slightly. Eddie can see the gleam of the button of his jeans, and he holds his breath again until Richie puts his arms back down. Immediately Eddie lowers his gaze to the linoleum floor, feeling his face burn. Part of him is afraid that Richie saw that, because if he did he’s definitely going to start in on that as a way of getting out of talking about something that makes him uncomfortable—and Eddie’s not sure why the blood transfusion makes him uncomfortable, but he’s being weird about it, instead of being grandiose and magnanimous and _yes, Eddie, I gave you the very blood from my veins._

Actually it’s probably because Eddie threw a shitfit about Richie wanting to help wash his hair.

“Yeah, I gave you blood,” Richie says, voice almost understated.

It twigs something in the back of Eddie’s memory—Richie in the restaurant saying, _Yeah, I got married_. No big deal. Just like then, the delivery is all wrong. Being too cool about it. Something else coming up behind it. _You didn’t know that I got married?_

Probably because Eddie heard it and it set off rounds of screaming klaxons in his brain and he had no idea why, except he did, except he didn’t want to know why, because if he knew that he knew then—

“Type O, baby,” Richie says, and jerks two thumbs at his own chest. “Universal donor.” He sits down on the plastic chair. “I thought it would freak you out.”

Eddie blinks at him. “Why would it freak me out?”

Richie snorts. “Because you were super phobic about blood when you were a kid.”

“Yeah,” Eddie says, “but that was during the AIDS crisis, and then last week all the blood came out of my body and I needed some new blood.” He shrugs, hurts himself, and winces. He shakes his head at his own stupidity—both just then and when he was a kid. He’s feeling a kind of sinking realization, a new and deeper anxiety making itself known. If Richie gave Eddie blood, that says something, because—“All those stories about contaminated blood transfusions were bullshit, anyway, they test the blood before they use it, and men who have sex with men aren’t allowed to donate.”

Richie is… not smiling. In fact, he’s very still.

It’s frightening, how still he is.

“What?” Eddie says, on the inside thinking, _stupid, if Richie’s never—why would I think he’d even be interested—_

“Not anymore,” Richie says slowly.

Eddie blinks at him. “What?” he says, because of course the rules against gay men donating blood only came into being _after_ it was a medical concern, and that’s why there’s no donation anymore—

Richie’s eyebrows lift and it seems significant somehow. “They changed the rule in 2015,” he says. “Now if you’ve had sex with a man, but not in the last year, you’re allowed to donate.”

And.

Eddie didn’t know that.

Because Eddie’s never had sex with a man.

Why does Richie know that?

“Oh,” Eddie says, wondering if he should ask and also waiting, waiting for Richie to say something to fill in the silence, to go off on a tangent or maybe fucking come out to him so that Eddie can come out in turn and maybe explain what the fuck he meant when he woke up in his hospital bed and said _I love you_ , to tell Richie that it’s nicer to hear _sweetheart_ than it is to hear _was that your first seizure?_ but that he’d still like a fucking explanation—

“Anyway, you kind of got a lot of blood all over my jacket,” Richie says. He throws the plastic bag casually onto the empty chair and then folds his arms behind his head, leaning back against the wall and stretching out his legs. He looks diagonal to the floor and wall that way, and at Eddie’s height from the bed his brain pipes up, _on display_ , but Richie’s rolling his eyes up toward the ceiling.

“And Stan’s cardigan. And also all of our clothes. So we thought, _Hey, Eddie needs some blood, better get tested to see if we match,_ except not Stan and Mike, because they still had open wounds, and frankly I’m surprised they let Bev donate, she was just soaking in blood, but maybe they thought it was yours? But only she and I were eligible, so.” He shrugs—big gesture, toward the ceiling. Richie’s playing for the back of the theater.

Eddie keeps staring at him. Did they—did they ask Richie? Did they say _have you ever had sexual contact with a man?_

Did Richie say yes?

Did they say _when?_

“Anyway, you’re not going to throw a tantrum over us doing that, are you?” Richie asks, his gaze lowering and focusing on Eddie again. “Because I’m not gonna fucking apologize for that one, jackass. If you’re dying, you can shut the fuck up and take the favor.”

“I’m not dying,” Eddie says.

Richie just looks at him.

He feels… unmoored. Which is not something he’s used to feeling in this bed, where he’s extremely centered and aware of where he is at all times and very aware of the perimeter of his body and blood and fluids. He feels like he’s been in orbit for he doesn’t know how long, but something collided with him and knocked him off course.

And Eddie’s not dying. He’s not dying, and his bodily systems are waking up, and Tracy is telling him that the clarity of his lung fluid is improving, and Nathan’s pointedly hinting about what kind of care he’s going to have once he’s discharged and.

He closes his eyes. “Can I ask another favor?” It comes out as a croak.

Immediately Richie switches to alert and earnest mode. “Yeah, man, anything. What is it?”

And that _anything_ is tossed out so casually—that’s what got to Eddie, about Richie saying _I got married_ , in the restaurant. He was fucking lying, of course, but it was how he said the words like they were insignificant. Like they meant nothing. Like they could be taken for granted. A big momentous concept— _Richie Tozier got married_. _Richie Tozier would do anything for me_ —reduced down to syllables and spat out without waiting for someone else’s reaction.

Eddie wants to cover his eyes, because he believes him. At this moment, he genuinely believes that Richie would do anything for him—or maybe he wants to believe it, and Eddie just feels like a piece of shit.

“Can I borrow your phone?” he asks.

He doesn’t look at him, but he can hear the creak of plastic and metal as Richie shifts his weight in the chair.

And there’s something defeated in Richie’s voice when he says, “Yeah, man. Of course.” Like he wanted Eddie to ask for something else.

_Don’t ask me, don’t ask me, don’t ask me,_ Eddie thinks.

“Gotta make an important phone call?” Richie asks, tone too gentle, too careless, like it doesn't mean anything at all. _I got married. Didn't you know I got married?_

And Richie knows. Richie’s not an idiot, no matter what he likes to pretend. Eddie just has to get this over with, and then he can explain everything, he just has to get this out of the way for decency’s sake.

He swallows again and forces the words out. “Yeah. I have to call my wife.”


	4. Where Are You?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi! I know it's been over a week, but I struggled a bit with this one. Also I think I have a cold, and this morning I woke up with an earache and if I have an ear- or sinus infection I'm going to be very angry, and also flat broke. But--on a more optimistic note, thanks again to my beta [qianwanshi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/qianwanshi/pseuds/qianwanshi) for reading over first and for pointing out opportune moments for Eddie to check Richie out.
> 
> Content warnings: discussion of suicide (Stan); panic attacks; Bev is hiding from her abusive husband; extremely irreverent comparison of religions; flashback to Eddie's injury; canonical violence (It/Pennywise); canon-typical language (It/Pennywise harasses Stan); CPR is not clean, pretty, or reliable; incidental and accidental injury.

It’s not that Eddie thinks he’s some kind of expert on pain now. It’s just that he’s experienced a lot of it in a relatively short period of time, and while he doesn’t enjoy it, he’s revised the amount of pain he thinks he can withstand.

The silence that Richie gives him in response is _blistering_.

He doesn’t look up. Richie might say that Eddie’s braver than he thinks he is, but he’s absolutely not brave enough for that.

The phone lands on his lap. Doesn’t physically hurt him, really, just a heavy, sudden, square weight on his thigh. The sound it makes when it lands on the blanket rings in his ears. He does look up for that—stupid—and Richie is just looking back at him. Something soft in his eyes.

Pity.

Discomfort and awkwardness twist immediately to rage, giving Eddie fuel to burn if he wants it, giving him the opportunity to shout in his own defense if he wants to—but he doesn’t. He wants to throw Richie’s phone back at him, but he doesn’t, because he’s not a fucking idiot. Oh sure, Eddie can’t get up to go buy his own phone, isn’t that sad? Isn’t Richie taking pity on him by letting him borrow his phone when he so clearly doesn’t want to? And Eddie’s ashamed of himself for kicking Richie out again—the idea of Richie sitting casually in the visitor’s chair while he calls Myra and explains to her that it’s over is out of the question—but what the fuck else is Eddie supposed to do?

“Sure you do,” Richie says, the edge of a knife in his voice. His words are serrated. _I don’t think you have to call your wife at all_ , those three words say.

What the fuck does Richie know about it? Richie’s not married, bad jokes aside. Richie has girlfriends that he treats like garbage and ends up making fun of in his comedy routine, but Eddie’s not like that—it isn’t Myra’s fault that Eddie decided marriage was something that he could do, despite knowing himself and his problems. Eddie feels like enough of a piece of shit already.

Jesus Christ, Richie’s tall. There’s something condescending in the way he puts his hands in his jacket pockets and leans back, something arch about the shift of his weight, the cast of his eyelids, the tight turn on his heel as he walks out of the room. And for Richie to leave without further comment—that’s probably the biggest warning sign Richie Tozier is capable of. Eddie wants to get up and go after him, to explain.

He can’t, though. Even if he were physically capable of catching Richie—and why does it feel so much like Richie’s running away when Eddie had every intention of asking him to leave in the first place?—he can’t _conspire_ against his wife. Marriage is a partnership. You’re on the same team. Eddie can’t—can’t bring other people into it deliberately, can’t make someone else complicit in what’s going to hurt her. Can’t share the blame. It’s something he’s got to shoulder himself. If he’s going to break her heart—maybe not romantically, if Myra truly loves him, and… Eddie doesn’t have the time to think about that, it’s too cosmic and misfortunate a question—the least Eddie can do is listen to her when it happens. He’s got to do this, awkward as he is, and he’s got to tell her the truth, and he’s going to hurt her, and there’s nothing he can do about that.

A sunk cost fallacy. Eddie knew he was going to hurt her one day, and he was putting that off as long as he could, trying not to think about how the longer it took, the worse the hurt would be.

Fuck.

He picks up the phone and turns it over, taps the button to make the screen wake up. It’s a different model than his own—it responds to just the touch of his thumb instead of the actual pressing of the button, and between his surprise at that and his clumsy uncooperative fingers, it takes him a few tries to get the screen to switch on and stay on.

It asks him for a passcode.

_Fuck._

Is this Richie’s punch back? He’s gonna leave Eddie here with a device he has no ability to use and no way to contact him to get him back?

He should have asked a nurse to borrow their phone, not Richie. But he wasn’t sure if any of the nurses would feel like they could say no—they’re at work—and he didn’t want to put them in that awkward position. There are some things you ask people who are paid to be there, and some things you ask people who show up because… because…

_Why is Richie still here?_

Not still here in this room, he’s definitely gone by now, but the general consensus is that Eddie’s going to live. Bill is gone, back to England with his wife to finish their project; Mike is getting ready to go, too. Beverly, Ben, Stan, and Patty are still here, though Bev has the excuse of leaving her husband and Stan is clearly taking his time after his suicide attempt.

Richie’s still here, like he’s got nowhere else to be. Like he’s fine to keep walking into Eddie’s hospital room and calling him _sugah_ and _sweetheart_ and _Eddie my love_ and stroking his cheek and running his hands through his hair.

Carefully, left elbow held tight to his side, Eddie inclines his head a little and reaches up to feel his clean hair, post-dry shampoo. The texture is dry and dusty. He remembers what Richie said about Doc from _Back to the Future_ and hopes he doesn’t appear to have just frosted his whole head. But the smell on his fingers is faintly sweet, and the itch on his scalp is gone, and he no longer feels like his hair is plastered to his head.

He stares at the lockscreen and keypad for several moments, and then he rings for a nurse.

Sarah arrives, leaning in through the door. “Everything okay?” she asks immediately. Eddie vomited this morning; she’s right to be wary.

“Yes, I’m so sorry,” Eddie says quickly, trying to get this out of the way in case she has real emergencies to tend to. “I have, uh, two weird questions, but if you’re doing something important it can wait.” All of Sarah’s job is important, she has more people to worry about than Eddie, and he feels bad for taking her time from them.

There’s a thrum of laughter bubbling under Sarah’s voice when she replies, “That’s fine. What’s weird question number one?”

He gestures to his own head as best he can. “Is there stuff in my hair?”

“Not that I can see,” she replies, tilting her head to the side and eyeing him from the door. “Did your friend do the dry shampoo thing for you?”

Eddie sits up, feeling as though he has only recently uncovered one of the secrets of the world. “Does everyone know about dry shampoo except me?”

“First time using it?” Sarah asks, and then nods. “It’s great. I have oily hair—if I don’t wash it every other day, you can, like, smell it. Some days I’d rather get twenty more minutes of sleep than spend fifteen minutes in the shower. Looks like you brushed it all out, from here. If not, I promise none of us will comment on it.”

He feels a little bit better that Richie didn’t leave him with a bunch of aerosolized clay in his hair.

“What’s the second question?” Sarah asks, smile tucked in the corner of her cheek.

The passcode is apparently six digits long. It’s time for Eddie to test his knowledge of Richie Tozier, after thirty years.

“Do you know the day that Buddy Holly died?” he asks.

Sarah looks at him for long seconds, her brow creasing in puzzlement, before she says, “Long, long time ago.”

Eddie snorts. Then he holds up the phone. “My friend walked out without telling me his passcode.”

“And it’s the day the music died?”

“He’s… a character,” Eddie says, because his first thought was _a parody of himself_.

She looks contemplative. “Mm, I don’t know off the top of my head—but I can ask Haley at the desk. She has the internet connection, she gets all the weird questions.”

“I—I’m sorry,” Eddie manages.

Sarah shakes her head. “Don’t worry about it.

He does worry, especially because she’s gone for ten minutes. He has to sit alone in this room, wondering what the hell Richie is doing now without his phone, as he turns it over and over in his palms, trying to get his dexterity to improve with a little practice.

When Sarah comes back she knocks on the sliding door and says, “Sorry about that. It was February third, 1959.”

“Thank you,” Eddie says, and opens up the phone to type it in. His right thumb doesn’t want to land on the keys. Too clumsy, too big. He switches to his left hand and types slowly, concentrating: _020359._ Biting his lip, he hits enter.

The screen trembles in rejection.

“Damn,” Eddie hisses.

“Not it?” Sarah asks.

“Guess not,” he replies, before he feels the flag go up in his brain. “Actually.”

And he taps in _231959_.

This time the phone opens to a grid of icons. Eddie sighs in relief.

“That was it?” Sarah asks.

“Yeah.”

“Great. Do you need privacy for your call?”

Oh jeez. The obstacle to defeat distracted him a little bit from his goal. Now he has no excuse for not calling Myra.

“Yes, please,” he admits, because this is going to be ugly.

“Okay.” She tugs on the sliding door. “I’m not gonna close this all the way, in case something happens and we need to get in. But I’ll close it like halfway and pull the blinds. Will that work?”

The blinds are important, he thinks. He needs them to hide his shame.

“Yes, thank you,” he says, and sits there awkwardly with the open phone in his hand while Sarah slides the door half-closed, then steps out to the window, waves at him, and vanishes behind the sudden unfolding of the blinds.

Then he steels himself—taking another long breath that aches deep in his body—and pulls up the phone function.

He memorized Myra’s number specifically for instances like this, where he doesn’t have access to his own contact list. He’s still a little surprised when she picks up for the unknown number, though.

There’s a tense breathlessness in her voice. “Hello?”

And suddenly Eddie has nothing to say.

“Myra,” he manages, tongue-tied.

For a moment she’s silent, as though stunned. Then when she speaks she sounds close to tears.

“Eddie?”

“Yeah,” he says. “I’m sorry.”

And then she really does burst into sobs.

There’s nothing Eddie can do about that but sit there and listen, every indrawn little breath and every pushed-out exhale grating on him. He doesn’t like tears—he never has, they’ve stressed him out since he was a kid—but he doesn’t know how long Myra’s had to live wondering if he was dead or alive, so he really has no right to complain about this. He listens to her cry.

“Are you okay?” she sobs. “Where are you?”

And that.

That’s difficult.

Because Eddie feels bad for Myra, but he still doesn’t want her to know where he is.

“I’m in the hospital,” he admits.

“Oh god,” she says wetly. Then, with sudden startling aggression: “I knew it, I’ve been calling ViCAP Unidentified Persons looking for you, but there was no one—I thought you might be dead.”

Oooh, that lands like she’s punched him. He kind of pushes out his chest a little, leaning into the very physical pain in the hopes he can ride it out faster.

“Which hospital?” she asks. “Where are you? What happened?”

Deep breath, aching all the way through to his back. “I was in a condemned house and it collapsed around me,” he says, reciting the lie Ben walked him through. “I had to have emergency surgery. I—my ribs are broken.” He adds that because he feels like he has to give her something, but if he gives her _I’ve been impaled_ he’ll never get free, and if he tells her the whole truth here, on the phone, with the door open for the medical staff to overhear—he’s going to spend the rest of his life having brain scans. “This is the first time I’ve been able to get to a phone, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to let you worry.”

And those things are true. He clings to them. This is the first time he’s had access to a phone to call her, and he is sorry, and he never intended to cause her to lose sleep or to make her cry or to have her spend time calling hospitals and morgues for John Does matching his description.

“Oh my god,” Myra repeats. “Oh my god.” She breaks into little hitching sobs again. “God, I’m so glad you’re alive. Where are you? What do you need? What should I bring?”

Deep breath, deep pain.

“We need to talk, Myra,” he says.

There’s more of her wet breathing and then she says, her voice small with confusion, “…What?”

He tries to take another deep breath, to focus on the things that are true.

“I’m really sorry about this,” he says, as if that’s any consolation. God, he’s such a heel. He’s gonna hurt her as surely as if he raised a hand to her, and there’s nothing he can do about it this time. “But I’m not coming back.”

Again, this time a little stronger, more intense: _“What?”_

“I—I got really hurt, Myra.” He used to call her Marty, sometimes, and the instinct is still there, to soften the blow. He liked to call her Marty. God, he’s so stupid. He’s pretty sure he had to read a short story in college about a guy like him, trying to make his wife into the man he wanted. Myra doesn’t even like the nickname Marty, but she likes that he has a nickname for her at all, so she always took what she could get from him. What little she could get.

“You’re—you’re—you’re dying?” she asks, all of her earlier relief vanished under rising panic.

“No.” He can’t let her think that, that’s not fair. “No, but I got really hurt, and I feel like—I, like, _understand_ things now, about life.”

“Eddie, I can’t understand you,” she says, and Eddie can hardly blame her for that, but then she goes on: “Slow down a little.” And it’s just because he’s talking too fast, in his own nervousness.

Right.

He doesn’t want to slow down a little. He doesn’t want to think about his words any more than he already has. But she has to comprehend him, at least. He tries to make himself talk slower, stringing each word after the other like cars in a train.

“And I thought—” This is awful to say, and he sounds genuinely defeated when he admits it. “—I don’t want to live like this anymore. I’m—I’m not happy. I’m sorry, but I’m not happy, and I don’t think you’re happy either—I know you’re not happy, and it isn’t fair to you, but—” Here he stalls, but he’s deathly afraid to let her get a word in before he’s done, so he stammers, “—but—but—this isn’t working out, this marriage, and I think we should—should admit it, by now. I think—”

She interrupts him. “Eddie, what are you _talking_ about? Where are you? Just calm down, Eddie, okay? You’re really worked up, and—”

“I’m gay,” he says.

Well.

That’s one way to rip the Band-Aid off.

Myra is silent for a moment and then she says, “You’re not gay, Eddie. Look, where are you? We should talk about this in per—”

Her flat refusal of the facts makes it easier to fight with her. It’s always better to know that you’re in the right, easier to be confident with a touchstone to return to. And it’s—men. Eddie’s morphined pretty hard still, enough that his sex drive is basically offline, but his eyes still look and see. Defiantly, almost.

“I am definitely gay,” Eddie almost laughs, and then he hates himself for it. “I’m sorry, Myra, I thought if I didn’t think about it I would be able to make it go away, but it’s who I am, and it’s not your fault, but that’s how it is. I’m sorry—”

“Eddie, you’re not gay,” she repeats, shades of incredulity in her voice. “I might not—I might not be _attractive_ , but we’ve had sex, and you were able to—to finish, you know, it’s not—”

He knew she was insecure when they started dating, but he failed to anticipate how he would aggravate that throughout their marriage. Just more of them laying in bed at night, carefully not touching, listening to crickets. White noise turned accusing and infuriating. He always knew it wasn’t her, and there’s relief now in admitting that the problem was him, because he knows how to solve it.

“No, no, no, Myra, it’s not your fault, it’s not about you being—being attractive, or not, and you’re not—not—not ugly, I swear, it’s not your fault, it’s never been—it’s always been me, you know, it’s not—”

“Eddie, where is this coming from?” Her tears are gone and instead of angry she just sounds confused, maybe a little exasperated. Definitely alarmed. “Just tell me where you are and we can sort this out!”

“We can’t,” he says. “And we shouldn’t try. I’m sorry, that’s how it is, we can’t be together anymore, it’s not your fault. This isn’t the hospital’s number. I’m so sorry.”

And he hangs up, her voice interrupted before she’s finished her outraged _“Eddie!”_ He imagines her calling back and harassing Richie, trying to get him to put Eddie back on the phone, so he goes into Recents. She calls back when he’s in the middle of trying to block her number—he does not need Richie and Myra to interact, hopefully ever—and he hits the button on the side twice to dismiss the call, then actually blocks her.

Then he has to lie down and shake.

It feels like the cold is getting to him all at once, his muscles going tight, his teeth chattering. He holds Richie’s phone to his chest as best he can with his right hand, which still isn’t working correctly and thinking about that just hypes him up higher, makes him feel worse, so he tries not to think about it. He just lays there and trembles, sweat breaking out all over him.

Part of him thinks _God, I wish Richie were here_ , but Richie’s mad at him too. He doesn’t know why he wants him, only that just having him in the room makes it feel warmer. Not physically warmer, but—he’s never been the kind of person to take comfort in someone else’s presence, but Richie makes him feel the way he does when he gets to travel for work, when he’s tired and he walks into the hotel room and sees there’s a place for him to lie down. A little island in the unknown, a little shelter in the strange. Stupid of him to think of it now, but he can’t help it. He feels helpless. He cannot help it.

His heart monitor starts doing the warning beeps and he tries to calm himself, but it isn’t long before Sarah’s back in the room.

“Everything okay?” she asks.

He looks up at her from the bed. “I broke up with my wife over the phone.”

“Oh,” she says, and then blinks. It might be the only possible response to such a declaration. Then she asks, as though to check: “On purpose?”

That almost makes him laugh. “Yeah,” he says, and then swallows. He hedges, “I might be having a panic attack?”

“Okay,” Sarah says, as though she sees this every day—and she might. “Can I hold your hand?”

He doesn’t normally like to be touched, but he nods. She walks over and wraps her hand tight around his; he’s constantly thrown by how strong these nurses are. Sarah has physically lifted and turned him over on the bed, and he’s still surprised by it every time. Her grip is strong and he holds back as best as he can with his weak right hand.

“This is your room,” she says. “It’s yours, and the only people who can come in are the ones who want to help you.”

But that doesn’t help, because Myra wants to help him, she just doesn’t know how, so she tried everything.

“You’re safe,” Sarah says. “It might not feel like it right now, but you’re safe here. Would another blanket help?”

He nods—he’s so fucking cold—and she goes over to the cabinet and pulls down another waffle blanket, this one cream-colored instead of blue. She lays it across him and he watches his own hand vanish under it, and then Sarah comes back and takes his hand up again and holds his gaze, and asks him to breathe with her. With her left hand she drums on her sternum. Eddie thinks that she’s keeping the rhythm to her pulse and that’s oddly comforting, the idea that no matter what happens her heart is slow and steady. He’s always had an easier time when someone else knew enough to guide him through what they were doing, and he feels his own heart rate slowly trying to match hers as they breathe together. It’s very much like his deep breathing exercises.

“Does that help?” she asks, when his heart monitor is no longer tattling on him.

He nods, surprised to find that it does. He might not have had real asthma, but it turns out the root of everything is in his lungs anyway.

“How about some water?” she suggests.

He wants that. He barely needs her reminder to take “little sips”—it just feels good to have the water clear the inside of his mouth, slide down his throat. Being home sick from school never felt this good—he was always sweaty under the blankets his mom piled on him, and no soup or water or hot tea could make him feel better than going out and just running on the grass would have, but this… this is almost nice. There’s something wrong and it’s in his head as much as there are very major things wrong with his body, but for once his body is soothing his brain.

“Is your friend coming back?” Sarah asks. She’s perched on the chair, one ankle tucked behind the other, her hands folded on her knees.

“No idea,” Eddie replies.

Sarah glances to where Eddie still holds the phone close to his chest and her eyebrows lift a little, but she says nothing.

“Is there anyone else you’d like me to call for you?” she asks. “Or would you like to call? I mean—a parent, a friend, if not… Your emergency contact?”

* * *

He has stress dreams. Strangely, not of calling Myra, or of the divorce. In his dream, he knows that she’s angry with him, and he’s scrambling to try to appease her. But it also happens to be Christmas, so he’s cooking dinner on his own. They’re having beef—grass-fed beef, because it’s healthy—and other things Eddie can’t make sense of with that fuzzy logic of dreams. And Eddie is, for some reason, in his mother’s house, and his mother’s in the next room and she’s talking to Myra. Sometimes he can hear them.

But inexplicably Richie is in the kitchen, perched at one of the chairs at the little table. And he’s talking and drowning them out—and half the time it works.

One of the alarms goes off and someone—Myra or his mother, he’s not sure—calls, “Eddie!” from the next room. Eddie goes over to the stove and tries to find the button to turn off the alarm, frantic.

Richie leans over his shoulder and reaches past him. When he pushes the button the alarm turns off and everything goes quiet.

Eddie sags with relief and leans halfway into him. “I’m so glad you’re here,” he mutters.

Richie pats him on the shoulder and takes a step back. Eddie can’t see his face quite clearly—dreams are like that—but something tells him that Richie’s hesitant. He doesn’t know what to say.

“What?” Eddie asks.

Richie sighs and says apologetically, “I’m Jewish.”

Eddie starts awake with an incredulous _“What?”_

Bev and Ben are staring at him. Poor Ben is cringing so hard he looks like he’s trying to vanish into thin air. Beverly looks a little more concerned.

Eddie tilts his head back and closes his eyes. “Sorry. Weird dream.” Then he remembers that Beverly has had some very weird and upsetting dreams for the entirety of her adult life and says, “Stress dream. I—I mean, it’s like, a normal dream, it’s not.” He sighs. “Fuck.”

“It’s okay,” Bev says.

Ben says, “Sorry to wake you.”

“You didn’t,” Eddie says. He wonders if it would be too weird to announce that Richie woke him, and then decides he doesn’t want to explain. “Sorry I was sleeping. How long have you been here?”

“Like half an hour,” Bev says.

Eddie has a moment of panic that comes from not knowing how long he slept, and fumbles around with his free hand. Richie’s phone is still there, half-wedged under one of the pillows and warm in the way that electronics retain heat. So not only has Richie not come back, but Eddie really did go through with breaking up with Myra over the phone.

“What is it?” Bev asks.

He looks up at her and it’s easier to say it to her, perpetually sympathetic as she is, than he expected. “I—told my wife I want a divorce. Over the phone. And then I had a panic attack.”

There’s a long pause and then Beverly says, “Good for you, honey.”

He thinks that he could have handled the _good for you_ , but the _honey_ gets to him. Because Richie called him _sweetheart_ even as he laughed.

“It’s really not,” Eddie says. “It was pretty stupid of me, because now I can’t go home and I have no idea where I’m going to go but I definitely don’t want to stay here, and the nurses are already making noises about what kind of help I’ll need when I’m discharged, and I don’t want help, but I also can’t lift my arms up over my head, and there’s a muscle in my back that keeps twitching, and I’m so itchy.”

Bev watches him with her big green eyes and nods a little, just to let him know that she hears it.

“You smell nice,” she offers.

Eddie is so unused to this idea, especially because he hasn’t taken a shower in at least a week, that it makes him laugh. He holds the pillow tight to his chest. “It’s the dry shampoo,” he says.

“Oh, I love dry shampoo,” Bev hisses, reaching out and touching his hair very gently.

Of course everyone knows about dry shampoo except him. Eddie defaults to her better experience and asks, “Is it supposed to feel dusty?”

“Yeah,” Bev says. He can hear the faint rustle of his hair as she plucks at it gently with her fingertips. Once a hairstylist told Eddie that if he could hear his hair he shouldn’t use a brush on it, he should just use a comb and wait for it to dry—but Eddie can always hear his hair. “What kind stuff was it?”

“Uh, purple?” Eddie offers.

“Ooh, Aussie. That’s good stuff.”

Eddie has to take her word for it. “Richie bought it.”

Bev’s eyebrows lift like she’s impressed.

“He uses three-in-one body wash, shampoo, and conditioner,” Eddie adds.

“Yeah, that sounds more like Richie,” Bev concedes. She lowers her arm and leans back out of Eddie’s space. “How do you feel?”

In lieu of any words to answer that question, Eddie lets out a kind of frantic sigh. “Sorry,” he says. “I—I’m better now, I guess I had to get that out of my system or something.”

Bev smiles a little but from the faint concern on Ben’s face over her shoulder, Eddie guesses he could be more convincing.

“What do you need?” Ben asks.

Eddie stares at him. “What do you mean?”

“What do you need?” he repeats. “What things can I bring to you?”

“I—” Eddie exhales again and this time it comes out shaky. Inexplicably he can’t think of anything that isn’t soda or Richie, and those are not great pillars to build a reinvented self on. “I mean, I’m okay—”

Ben stares at him, face changing not at all but eyes going inexplicably hard.

Eddie recoils a little. “What?”

“Well, first of all,” Bev says, “if you’re leaving your wife, you need an attorney. Would you like mine?”

Eddie blinks at her. “You’re getting divorced?”

Bev nods.

He slumps sideways onto the pillow, so full of relief he can no longer hold himself up. “Do you think we’re having midlife crises?”

“Absolutely,” Bev replies without hesitation. “State of New York?”

Eddie does not understand.

“Are you filing for divorce within the state of New York?” Bev replies.

Eddie has no idea where else he would file. He and Myra have always lived in New York together. “Uh, yes?”

“Good,” Bev says. She glances at the phone gripped in Eddie’s hand and then frowns slightly. “Is that yours?”

“No,” Eddie admits.

“So a cell phone would be a good place to start,” Ben says, looking down at his own phone. From the tapping of his thumb, Eddie guesses that he’s typing out a list. “And then a divorce attorney.”

He finds himself laughing nervously.

Ben looks up, his gaze relaxed again. “Where do you want to go?”

Eddie blinks again.

“Once you’re discharged,” Ben clarifies. “If you’re getting a divorce, I’m guessing you don’t want to go back to New York City.”

“No,” Eddie agrees. He plucks at the uppermost waffle blanket, just for something to focus on. “And not here, either.”

“Okay,” Ben says. “Well, Stan and Patty are going to Buenos Aires, Bill and Audra are still filming somewhere in northern England right now, I think, and Mike is getting ready for a road trip.” He looks Eddie over. “I don’t think you’re ready for that,” he admits.

“I think you’re right,” Eddie agrees. He doesn’t know exactly what all the consequences of a collapsed lung are, but he has a vague idea that it has something to do with pressure in his chest, and that boarding a plane is something his doctors would have opinions about him doing. “Why’s Stan going to Buenos Aires?”

“Anniversary trip,” Bev replies calmly. “Apparently they bought the tickets the night of.”

The idea that Stan and Patty bought the tickets, that Stan then went upstairs and tried to kill himself in the bathroom, and that they’re still going on the trip makes Eddie’s head spin a little. He tries not to think about it.

“And as soon as Tom’s been served, Ben and I are going traveling,” Bev says pleasantly, as though she’s like Mike or Stan and is planning a nice little vacation instead of dodging the kind of man who leaves bruises on his wife. “But depending on where you want to go, we could make our plans around that.”

“No,” Eddie says automatically, but then he considers what it means that their circle is breaking apart. Bill already left—he has work and a wife he seems fairly attached to, and they had deadlines that Bill broke by coming to Maine in the first place—but Richie assures him that Bill still seems to remember them. And it doesn’t surprise him that Mike is ready to leave Maine. But the idea of Stan and Patty going back to Georgia and then back to their lives, and then Beverly and Ben taking off somewhere else—he feels their numbers dwindling.

Leaving him and Richie. And Richie’s going to want to go home. Probably sooner rather than later.

“I mean, I don’t know… where I’ll be allowed to go,” Eddie says. “Or where I’ll have to do physical therapy, or for how long—you guys can’t make plans based around me. I don’t…” He doesn’t know where to go, actually. Not Maine, and not New York City. There are a lot of places in the continental United States he could go to that match that description, but for some reason he can’t think of a single one.

Well, that’s not true. Richie lives in L.A. And his last show before he came out to Derry was in Chicago.

Just the thought of a car ride that long makes his back hurt. And—fuck, he’s going to be on painkillers. He’s not going to be allowed to drive or operate heavy machinery. Maybe he’ll have to stay in Bangor.

“Fuck,” he says aloud, his eyes unfocused until the waffle weave blends into a cream-colored blur. “My wallet. My driver’s license. All my cards.”

He has no money, no identification, and no proof of residence. And he’s just alienated his wife, who has all the documentation he could use to gather those things again.

He tries to take a deep breath but his chest is constricted, and—yep, that’s a panic attack. That’s the old throat-closing-up sensation that he used to call asthma when he was a kid, back when any emotional response was a symptom of something wrong. He sits up—he has vague thoughts about expanding his lungs and reaching more air when he’s not collapsed under the blankets—and focuses on breathing in through his nose and out through his mouth.

“Eddie?” Bev asks.

“Okay,” Ben says, with none of Bev’s anxiety. “Are we taking some deep breaths?”

Eddie sucks in another breath and nods.

“Okay,” Ben says. “We can do that. Would a count help?”

He nods again.

“Okay.” Ben taps on the metal arm of the chair, like this is something he does in every social situation. Eddie hears the rush of his breathing, slow and easy and unconcerned. Unlike Sarah’s aura of expertise and generally being in control, Ben seems imperturbable, his steady calm making his presence in the room seem larger. Eddie doesn’t look at Beverly but he hears her breathing in time too.

They all appear to be doing some weird meditating when Nathan comes by to check on Eddie.

“Everything okay in here?” he asks.

“I made some questionable life choices,” Eddie admits. “I think we’re meditating now.”

“Sounds good,” Nathan says. “Gonna give you a five-minute warning before we go for a walk, all right?”

Eddie nods.

“Don’t hyperventilate,” Nathan advises, and then leaves.

Eventually Eddie gets lightheaded and lays back down on the bed.

“Better?” Ben asks.

“I mean, not really,” Eddie says. His situation has not changed at all, but he no longer feels like he’s actively dying. “I have no idea how I’m going to get out of Maine.”

“Do you ever bank online?” Ben asks.

Eddie nods—he went paperless some time ago, and he checks his bank information regularly. He’ll just have to go online, punch in his security questions, and submit a new address. That’s a thing that people do, right? He’ll have to get a new cell phone as well, whenever he’s mobile again. He should be able to go to the Verizon store or something and just get a new model, once he has some money.

He has no identification.

“Fuck,” he sighs again, but his body seems too tired to produce the same kind of existential despair it did before. “I have no money.”

“I’ll lend you money,” Ben says.

The fact that he says _lend_ is what gets Eddie through it. If Ben had said _it’s taken care of_ or _I’ll give you the money_ , he would probably melt down again. But _lend_ means that Ben is taking Eddie’s word for it, that he has funds and will be able to pay him back at some point.

“Are you sure?” Eddie asks anyway.

“Definitely sure,” Ben says. “I have had no one to spend money on since my mom died, my savings can take it.”

That’s right. Eddie had forgotten that Ben was also raised by a single mom.

“Here’s the other thing,” Ben says. “If Beverly and I are going to be traveling, I’ll need a house sitter.”

Eddie stares at him, hoping his skepticism comes through clearly. He knows what Ben’s doing.

“The place is in upstate New York,” Ben says. “So you’ll be able to do whatever legal stuff you need to from there. And when you have to come back up here to see your doctors, the drive shouldn’t be too bad. But I know there are physical therapy places in the nearest town. Otherwise it’s kind of out in the woods.”

“Of course it is,” Eddie says out loud, because Ben is basically famous for being a hermit, and _of course_ he has some kind of cabin in the woods that he needs his sick friend to go live in for him while he’s traveling with the long-lost love of his life.

Injured friend.

Eddie’s not sick, he’s injured.

“Seriously, there’s a lot of glass, people can tell when the place is empty,” Ben says. “You’d be doing me a favor by scaring off burglars.”

“You don’t have a security system?” Eddie asks.

“I have a security system, but even if it went off, at this point I’d kind of be like…” He shrugs. “Fuck it.”

Eddie shakes his head. “How am I going to get to New York?” he asks.

Bev goes conspicuously still. Eddie looks to her and she looks back. “You and Richie haven’t talked yet?”

Eddie sighs through his nose. “No. Richie and I haven’t talked yet.”

Bev asks, “Did he say when he’s coming back?”

Grimacing, Eddie shakes his head.

“Okay,” Bev says in a tone that very much says it’s not okay. “Well, we could all drive down together. I’m in no rush, so if you want to interview in-home nursing care, Ben and I can stay for as long as that takes. And—Tom has no reason to think I’d be in upstate New York, so depending on—”

Eddie shakes his head again. “I don’t want you to put off your plans for me.”

“Why not?” Bev asks. “We love you.”

He doesn’t know why, but that hurts. Hurts him so physically that his hands fist, nails pressing into his palms, and he has to scrunch his eyes shut.

“What’s the matter?” she asks.

“I can’t,” Eddie says, and then shakes his head until Nathan comes back to walk him down the hall.

Bev kisses him on the cheek before they leave.

* * *

Richie is waiting on the visitor’s chair when Eddie comes back.

Nathan is still half-supporting Eddie, and Eddie’s ass is still hanging out.

“Fuck you,” Eddie says immediately. “Close your eyes.”

Richie can see nothing from his angle to the right of the door, and Nathan’s body blocks Eddie’s for the most part, but he rolls his eyes and then yanks off his glasses. “Happy?”

“No,” Eddie replies.

“Uh, Mr. Kaspbrak,” Nathan says.

“It’s fine,” Eddie says, and seethes a little bit as Nathan helps him settle back into bed. Eddie keeps glancing over his shoulder to check, but Richie has one big hand over his eyes again.

Nathan still seems dubious about Richie’s presence. “We really don’t like to have visitors being distracting during the exercises.”

“I’ll be quiet,” Richie says, eyes still covered.

Eddie scoffs. “You’re genetically incapable of being quiet.”

“I’ll be dead,” Richie says, and slumps back in his chair like a puppet with his strings cut. His head drops over the back, showing his jawline at a truly bizarre angle where his throat relaxes into it.

“Well, that’s a different medical concern,” Nathan says dryly.

But Eddie’s a lot less sensitive to the idea of Richie hearing him using an incentive spirometer or practicing his coughing exercises than he is to the idea of Richie seeing him shuffling around in a hospital gown, so he continues as though Richie isn’t there, and Richie lies on the chair with his arm thrown over his face like he is also not there, and Nathan definitely thinks they’re weird, but Eddie’s okay with that because it’s true.

When Nathan leaves, Eddie sighs and adjusts the blankets around him. Richie’s cell phone is no longer there. Either Richie picked it up when he came into the room, or someone stole it while Eddie left it unattended.

“Uh, did you get your phone?” Eddie asks.

Richie perks up, becoming animate again instead of playing dead, but keeps his eyes covered. “Me?”

“Yeah, you.”

He digs in his pocket with his free hand and holds up the phone for Eddie’s inspection. “Yeah.”

Eddie lets out another sigh, this one of relief. “Okay. You can look now.”

Richie lifts his head out of his elbow and pushes his glasses back onto his face. There’s something sharp about his features, about the tightness around his eyes and jaw.

“How’s Mrs. K?” he asks.

“Pretty mad,” Eddie says. “Probably because I told her I want a divorce over the phone.”

Whatever Richie was expecting, it clearly wasn’t that, because his eyes pop, round and black behind his frames. “Oh,” he says, mouth completely round too.

“So I blocked her number on your phone, because otherwise she’d be calling and calling,” Eddie goes on, riding the inertia of his irritation as far as it will take him. “If you unblock her and talk to my wife, Richie, I swear I’ll never speak to you again.”

Richie holds up both hands, fingers splayed and palms outstretched. “Got it,” he says. “Don’t need to get in the middle of the Kaspbrak marriage. There are easier ways to die.”

Eddie snorts and rolls his eyes, because the idea that Richie’s not already in the middle of Eddie’s marriage is ridiculous. Granted, it’s through no fault of his own, but he’s there. Eddie was never going to go back to Myra without thinking of Richie.

“And then I told Ben that I have no money, no identification, and no place to live, and now he’s offering to let me house-sit while he and Beverly travel as she gets her own divorce, so there’s that,” Eddie says. “That’s what you missed when you walked out without your phone.”

Richie grins humorlessly. “Well, sorry, I didn’t know if you and Mrs. K wanted some privacy for phone sex or something, because I—”

“I’m gay,” Eddie says.

And Richie chokes. Chokes so hard that his chest jerks forward and he breaks into a round of coughing, covering his mouth with his elbow again. Eddie watches him cough and flail uselessly, thinking of a summer day when he nearly drowned Richie in the quarry, not for any malice but because Richie was always so happy to physically fight Eddie in a way that no one else was. Richie would grab him by the arms and try to pin him to the ground and threaten to drool on him, and Eddie would shriek with rage and try to kick him in the balls, and they would go rolling over and over on the ground.

Richie never actually drooled on him, but he definitely licked the side of Eddie’s face once, and Eddie screamed so hard that a bunch of birds flew out of the trees like in a cartoon.

“I—you—what?” Richie manages.

“Tell me you’re not gonna throw up again,” Eddie says.

“What kind of homophobic—did I hear you right?” Richie scrunches his eyes shut and opens them again, like he’s trying to reset all his sensory input.

“Depends,” Eddie says dryly, “what did you hear?”

Richie stares at him. His hand is still resting on his shoulder, arm bent across his body, but he’s just gawping at Eddie like he’s forgotten about it entirely.

“Pretty sure it’s just men, anyway,” Eddie says. If there’s a woman out there that he can be attracted to, he hasn’t met her and he doesn’t think he will. Now he just has to hope that once he comes off the morphine his… system still works the way that he expects (and has feared for most of his life).

“Oh, so it could also be puppets?” Richie quips immediately.

“Go fuck yourself. How about that?” Eddie prompts. He glances up at the balloon. “And what the fuck is that?”

Richie glances upwards too, and then reaches out his free arm and begins twining the ribbon around his hand, reeling the balloon down. The balloon says in bold letters, SHE IS WITH JESUS NOW. Jesus’s unicorn appears to be leaping over a rainbow.

“What the fuck, Richie?” Eddie asks, bewildered.

Richie sighs, voice dropping low and exhausted. “I know, right? I had to buy it, it was like it was speaking to me.” He tips his head all the way back and props one arm under it to look up, dreamily, like they’re kids watching clouds again. “Is the rainbow in poor taste now?”

“I think that Jesus was in poor taste in the first place.”

“Well, you can take it up with Jesus,” Richie says.

“I’m taking it up with you, you bought the damn thing.”

Richie winces hard, eyes shut and nose scrunching as he grimaces.

“What?” Eddie asks.

Richie shakes his head. “You just set me up for so many gay jokes, and I don’t know how long of a moratorium is appropriate.”

“Oh, _now_ you worry about being appropriate? Now? After forty years?”

“You only met me when I was seven, for all you know I could have spent the first six years of my life being a perfect angel.”

“Based on the fact that your parents stopped having kids after you, I’m gonna go with no.”

“Yeah, well, what’s that say about you?”

Eddie snorts. “My dad _died_ , Rich.”

“Rather than be trapped in a house with you. What’s that say about you?”

_Say something real, say something real,_ Eddie urges him. He takes a deep breath and extends his left arm as far as he can, feeling the protest of his shoulder joint in response. “And here you are,” he says.

Richie slides all the ribbon off his hand at once and the balloon leaps back up to the ceiling, where it bounces and then floats idly.

“And here I am,” Richie replies. Eddie glances back down from the balloon to find that Richie is watching him from his lazy slouch, his chin lowered slightly and his eyes trained on him from under his slashing brows. The fold of his arm and his knee say he’s being deliberately casual; the flat line of his mouth says he’s hiding what he’s really thinking.

Difficult bastard.

Eddie waits for him to say something, but he doesn’t, just lets the silence stand and toys with the end of the balloon’s ribbon.

“So,” Eddie says, watching his face carefully, “I wanted to ask you something.”

Richie’s gaze flicks over Eddie’s shoulder, toward the window, and there’s a faint pulse in his jaw.

_Ah,_ Eddie thinks clearly. _He’s afraid._

So he changes his mind.

“Are you Jewish?” he asks.

And he’s surprised Richie a second time; Richie actually sits up. “What?”

“Because I had this dream.”

Richie’s expression flicks to the incredulous. “And I was circumcised?”

“Jesus!”

Richie steers the balloon back a bit, as though to shield Him from the conversation. “Don’t bring Him into this.”

“Oh my god,” Eddie says. He wrinkles his nose and twists away from Richie entirely, trying to hide his blush. “It was nothing like that, you complete monster.”

“And I had a monster dick. Got it.”

“You _are_ a monster dick.”

“And I _was_ a monster dick? Just like, a walking talking dick?”

“No!” Eddie puts a hand over his mouth to try to stifle his own laughter before Richie can notice and feel encouraged. “I dreamed I was trying to make Christmas dinner, and you were there being—you about it, and then you told me you were Jewish.” As Eddie leaned on him. He takes a deep breath and feels the answering stretch on either side of his ribcage, then tries to make his tone as casual as Richie’s. “Just wanted to make sure I wasn’t forgetting anything, that’s all. You’re always a walking talking dick.”

“That’s true,” Richie says. “See? You haven’t forgotten anything.” There’s a creaking sound as he shifts his weight on the plastic and metal chair. In a more subdued tone he says, “Dad’s Jewish.”

Eddie feels his eyebrows lift. “Really?”

“Yeah. And it goes through the mother, so I’m just a really bad Catholic. Like, the worst Catholic, actually. And Dad never kept kosher or anything. I had no idea what Stan was talking about with… anything, really.”

“Anything Jewish or anything at all?”

“Oh, anything at all,” Richie says airily. “I still have no clue, anything that Stan says. You were hurt, he was screaming and started yanking my jacket off, I was like, ‘What?’ until I worked out he was trying to stop the bleeding.”

Eddie blinks once, twice, and then he remembers—Richie still under him and with Eddie’s blood spilled across his face, and suddenly Stan out of nowhere, yanking his cardigan off. _Move, move_ , he said, hand on Eddie’s arm and carefully guiding him away from Richie, Stan grabbing Richie’s hands and putting them on Eddie’s chest. _Right arm. Left arm, come on. Come on._ Richie taking his jacket off and holding pressure on Eddie’s chest, and Stan slowly lowering Eddie to the cavern floor.

It’s voice: _Maybe you shoulda cut a little deeper, huh, Stanley? I can help with that. I can… HELP… with that._

Richie: _Stan. Stan Stan Stan, get out of the way, Stan._ Taking up space over Eddie.

“I remember,” Eddie says slowly.

Richie filled up most of the space over him, but he was all white and black in the dark cavern—Stan was pale, and utterly furious, and he startled all of them when he lifted his head up and screamed _You’re fucking nothing! You’re fucking nothing, you don’t exist, you don’t exist, you don’t exist!_ And then It lunged for Stan and Richie dragged him down, half on top of Eddie, and the sudden impact should have hurt but it didn’t because Eddie didn’t have enough blood in his body to hurt, didn’t have enough pain left to direct toward the new impact. And then Stan looked from the bone spike embedded in the cavern wall to Richie and demanded, _Why aren’t you maintaining pressure, numbnuts?_

“Did he call you numbnuts?” Eddie asks slowly.

Richie gives a hollow laugh. “Yeah, I wasn’t maintaining pressure.”

Because Richie was stunned—Eddie was stunned, but he can remember that—he remembers Richie suddenly surging up and being certain that Richie had just been stabbed through too—the cross of his arms over his chest, the way he suddenly tipped over backwards, and Eddie thought, _No, no,_ and then Richie was throwing the claw aside, because he’d just yanked Its leg off.

“You were—” Eddie says slowly. “You—”

“I’m sorry,” Richie says.

Eddie stills and then turns back to look at him. Richie has released the balloon—it’s floating limply on the ceiling, the ribbon hanging loose, red and flat and reassuringly not white string—and he’s drawn his feet up to the chair again, putting his arms around his knees. He looks young again.

Eddie stares at him. “For what?”

He’s still—big. His shoulders don’t fit in the chair; he has his chin tucked down behind his knees, so he just peers over his glasses at Eddie. One hand clasps the other, and his knuckles are white on both hands, and Eddie can see an inch of pale skin where the sleeves of his jacket don’t come down to cover his wrists. He’s wearing different shoes than he did when he arrived in Derry—they’re bright and clean, for all they’re ridiculous sneakers. When he speaks, his voice is very small.

“I was trying to keep you awake,” he says, and then clears his throat.

Eddie blinks at him. He has vague ideas about blood pressure and consciousness—nothing concrete, but he was bleeding out, he thinks that trying to keep him awake was probably a good idea. Eddie remembers talking—to Stan, mostly, because Stan seemed like he was on the verge of breaking down, and he had to assure him that Eddie’s blood was clean, that he wasn’t going to catch anything from Eddie, that he’d never been dirty after all, and then he remembered Richie and Richie was there, blocking out the rest of the cavern with how he leaned over him.

“Yeah?” he manages.

Richie takes his glasses off again and wipes at his eyes with the back of his hand, but his voice is relatively steady when he says, “And you kept falling asleep. So I… yelled at you, a little.”

Eddie blinks at him. “You always yell at me.”

But that’s not true either, really.

Richie shakes his head slowly. _Not like this._ Richie yells for fun, for dramatics, for a laugh. He’s never had to apologize to Eddie afterwards, because it’s never been to make Eddie feel bad. Not that keeping him awake would make Eddie feel bad—he’s hardly going to hold it against Richie for trying to keep him alive.

“And then I hit you,” Richie says, voice even smaller.

Eddie blinks, reminded of Richie at thirteen and confessional again. _I hit Bill._ Richie said that he was the worst Catholic—but he always went to Eddie to say the worst things he thought, the worst things he did.

“Okay,” Eddie says slowly. He can’t remember that—remembers Richie saying, _Hey, hey,_ very gently, the same way he said _I got married_ at the restaurant; remembers taking a moment to make a stupid joke, just to put a smile back on Richie’s panicked and bloody face; but he doesn’t remember Richie hitting him. “Like how?”

Richie’s shoulders ratchet up and then down in a slow-motion shrug. “Slapped you. Couple times. Trying to make you look at me.”

It was never an effort to make Eddie look at Richie. Eddie was always looking at Richie.

“Well that’s okay,” Eddie tells him. “I mean—I don’t remember it, it’s fine.”

“You passed out anyway,” he says, his voice curiously flat. “And Stan asked me if you were breathing, and then he told me to do chest compressions, and—” His hands come up and he covers his mouth with his fingers splayed over his jaw, patches of his stubble peeking through. He takes a breath and Eddie feels his lungs expand in sympathy. His eyes close. The next thing he says comes out too indistinct for Eddie to hear.

He leans forward. “What?”

“I broke your ribs,” Richie repeats.

Eddie freezes in place. He has to reach out and grip the safety rail to support himself. He swallows.

Richie is still speaking. “Sounded like tree branches breaking. You know what that sounds like?”

Well now Eddie’s imagination is being entirely unnecessarily illustrative. But now he understands why Richie asked him about trees.

“If it helps,” he says slowly, “I know you wouldn’t have done it if the—if I hadn’t been impaled.” He catches himself before he can mention the demon clown in the ward that is already being very nice about the idea of him leaving. “I don’t think you go around breaking people’s ribs willy-nilly.”

“Willy-nilly,” Richie repeats, his voice still weirdly flat.

“And—and it worked,” Eddie insists. “I mean, you did it to save my life, and it worked, so I’m not gonna hold that against you, not gonna be like, _Well, Richie broke my ribs, so_ —what?”

Because Richie is staring at him now. His eyes and nose look red now, like he’s on the verge of crying, but he just looks at Eddie with something like horror. Slowly his legs unfold and his feet land on the floor with a thump.

“What?” Eddie asks again.

Richie has gone very white. He puts his glasses back on his face slowly. “They didn’t tell you?” he asks.

A well-suppressed panic is now making itself known somewhere beneath Eddie’s diaphragm. “Tell me what? Richie?”

Richie stands from his chair suddenly, holding his arms up as though ready for a fight. “They didn’t tell you,” he says again, but this time it’s not a question; it doesn’t seem he’s speaking to Eddie at all. “Those sons of bitches, I thought they’d told you, I didn’t think they’d—” He covers his mouth again and moves toward the doorway.

“Richie,” Eddie says, louder, urgently, “you can’t leave. I can’t get up, don’t leave.”

Richie turns back around, hands up and appeasing. “I’m not leaving, Eds, okay? I just—” He seems to rotate in place for a moment, and there’s not enough space for him to do it—Eddie expects him to collide with the cabinet. His hands go up like he wants to clutch at his head for a moment, and then they go back down. “Shit, shit, shit,” he mutters.

“Rich,” Eddie says again, trying to get his attention. Richie glances up at him. “Just say it.”

Richie shakes his head again. “Nope, I’m gonna fuck this up and it’s gonna be bad.” He covers his mouth again momentarily and then bobs his head like he’s agreeing with himself.

“You’re not exactly inspiring confidence,” Eddie warns him.

Richie turns on the spot again and then lifts his palms out to Eddie in the universal symbol for _Whoa Nelly._ “Okay,” he says. “What did they tell you about your surgeries?”

“I—had them?” Eddie manages. “Two at one hospital, one at the other?”

Richie nods. “That’s all?”

“That they had to fix a lot of blood vessels, and my lung?”

Richie tips his head back in a gesture that, on any other man, would be prayer for patience. “That’s all they told you. Okay.” He steeples both hands over his mouth, looks at Eddie very directly, and then points at him with his folded hands. “You died.”

Eddie blinks at him.

“No I didn’t,” he says stupidly. He’s right here. He’s not dead. Also he’s not high enough on morphine to start wondering whether or not he’s actually here—as far as dying dreams that are the last firings of his neurons go, this one is both too boring and stressful at the same time, and also all of Eddie’s teeth are still in his mouth.

Richie lowers his hands, lifts them again, and lowers them again. Then he says, “Twice.”

“I died,” Eddie repeats, trying to make sure he’s got this straight.

Richie’s wearing his _yeah, can we have the check?_ face. He nods.

“Twice,” Eddie finishes.

Richie nods again.

Eddie has to take a deep breath at that; it hurts. “Okay,” he says.

Richie’s face goes flat and then almost indignant. “Okay?”

Eddie tries to shrug at him. It doesn’t change anything, it’s just more trouble with his surgeries, with his body. Dying, he slowly realizes, is just one more thing that his body can do, even without his knowledge.

“What do you mean, ‘I died’?” he asks, because he’s not completely sure that he understands.

Richie takes a deep breath now and Eddie mimics him almost instinctively. His chest hurts.

“They came out, when you were in surgery, and said you’d crashed on the table, but that they’d gotten your heart started and that you were breathing again. And then it happened again, and they resuscitated you again, and then they put you in the chopper.”

“Oh,” Eddie manages. “So how long was I… dead?”

“I don’t know,” Richie says. “I only heard the first one. No one was fit to ask questions except Bill. And, uh.” He shakes his head. “Someone gave me a sedative, because I was apparently out of my fucking mind. Sorry. If—if I’d known you’d ask questions about it—when your _fucking doctor_ should have told you— _Christ_ , I hate Maine.”

Eddie blinks, running back through the conversation he had with Dr. Fox that he actually remembers, since he knows he lost one to the anesthesia after his surgery. She mentioned _events_ during his surgeries— _medical events on the table_.

“Holy shit,” Eddie says, staring vacantly at Richie without really seeing him. “She said I had _events_ —she meant I died. She meant I _died_?” And he opens and closes his slow right hand—clumsy, now, he realizes, because of interrupted circulation that happened _when his heart stopped_. He looks down at his overlong nails. They need trimming, as surely as he needs a shave.

“She said _events_?” Richie parrots back, outrage rising in his voice. “Because yeah, I’ll say dying is kind of an event, yeah.”

Eddie lets his eyes focus and realizes that Richie is absolutely vibrating in place—not the way he used to buzz with suppressed energy when they were in school and he was on the teacher’s last nerve, but the same way he seemed ready to fight Mike in this room just days ago.

“Richie,” Eddie says, “sit down.”

Instead of listening, Richie tilts his head all the way back and groans. “How can you be so calm?” he demands.

And Eddie starts laughing.

It hurts kind of a lot actually. He pulls the pillow to his chest to brace on one side, and then he lies back on the others to try to put padding on his entry wound. He can’t stop laughing all of a sudden, just hysterical, because Richie asked _How can you be so calm?_

“Eddie?”

Richie has come closer, hands knitted around the safety rail. He leans over Eddie with concern—like Eddie’s dying, except Eddie’s not dying, he’s done that already and now he’s alive, he’s on the mend, he’s better than he ever thought he was. And Eddie can’t stop laughing.

“I’m not calm,” Eddie manages. There are tears running out of his eyes and they sting. “I’m not calm.”

“Yeah, I can see that, buddy.”

If Eddie had full range of motion, he would hit Richie with the pillow for that _buddy_. Eddie just came out to him; Eddie _died_ ; Eddie’s not his buddy.

“I’m not calm, and I can keep it together most of the time, but I can’t manage you, Richie, so you have to stop, all right? You just have to stop.” He wipes at the sides of his face. “Give me a tissue.”

“ _Manage_ me,” Richie scoffs, but he’s already twisting around to grab the tissue box again. “What do you mean, _manage me_?”

“I mean—” Eddie accepts the tissue and dabs at his eyes. “—you can’t be running around picking fights with Mike and walking around without your phone and offending Patty. I have—” He laughs again and then blows his nose. When he looks up Richie is still watching him, his face set in a scowl. “—so much to worry about, literally more than I’ve ever had to worry about in my entire life.” And at the same time, somehow, less as well. Somehow the biggest things feel lifted off his infirm shoulders. “I’m having a midlife crisis. I can’t run interference for you too. I can’t run at all.”

“Yet,” Richie says. “You don’t have to run interference for me.”

He’s still scowling, but it feels harmless in a way. He holds his hand out for Eddie’s used tissue. Eddie gives him a revolted expression and Richie rolls his eyes and turns to pick up the garbage can again. His arms are so stupidly long that he doesn’t even have to let go of the safety rail to lean across the room and grab it, and Eddie pitches the tissue into it without comment.

“Good,” Eddie says, “I died, I’m too tired.”

Richie blinks at him and then smiles suddenly, looking shocked. He sets the garbage can back down. “You did,” he agrees. “Is that the kind of thing that only you’re allowed to make jokes about, or is it fair game?”

Eddie shakes his head. “You’re gonna have to work harder than that if you want to make jokes about it.” He heard what Richie said about having to be sedated, the first time that Eddie crashed on the table. “That’s the kind of thing you earn.”

“I’ll work for it,” Richie says calmly, and falls back into the seat. “Move your trash cans, bring you tissues, wash your hair, whatever you want. Carry you up the stairs to Ben’s place.”

Something inside Eddie goes very still and alert, watchful. Eddie dabs at his eyes with the back of his left hand and tries to conceal how attentive he’s become. “What?”

“Well, he’s an architect, he makes skyscrapers, I don’t want to know what he’s got going on in his own house. He looks like the kind of person who does the stairclimber machine at the gym.”

Eddie swallows. “You don’t want to go… go back to your tour or?”

Richie blows air out through his lips with a _pbbth_. “Cancelled that the night I choked in Chicago.” He raises his eyebrows. “Last time I heard from him, Steve was talking about _terminating my contract_ , so.”

“Jesus, Rich.” Eddie stares at him. Mike might not technically have lost his job over the events in the sewer, but he might as well have; and Richie has the whole Bowers thing to contend with. Eddie still hasn’t heard the details.

Richie rolls his eyes as though it’s of no consequence. “He didn’t terminate it over the cocaine, he won’t over this.”

“The what?” Eddie repeats.

Richie waves one big hand. “Don’t worry about it, I’m forty, I’m boring now. This is the most interesting thing I’ve done in a decade.”

Eddie lifts his eyebrows. “Masturbators Anonymous?”

Richie smirks. “I knew you watched my stuff.”

“I told you I watched your stuff, I told you it was garbage.”

“You said I’m actually funny.” He grins a little wider, showing teeth, and tilts his head back and forth, proud of himself.

“Yeah, well, I knew none of that stuff was yours.”

“The Masturbators Anonymous thing is made up,” Richie says. “As is the girlfriend.”

Whatever thing sat up alert inside Eddie to pay attention to Richie now basically has its nose pressed to the glass.

“You made up a girlfriend for your show?” At Richie’s defensive hand-waving, Eddie corrects himself: “Sorry, your ghostwriter made up a girlfriend for your show?”

“Obviously,” Richie says, and waves at himself, long body and crossed legs. “Who do you think is going to want to put up with all this?”

_Me_ , Eddie thinks clearly, and tries to reel it in.

“Men?” Eddie asks quietly.

Richie’s extended arm wraps around his torso and his other hand presses to his jaw. He looks down at his own knee. “Not recently,” he murmurs back, just as quietly in the room with the gentle beeping of Eddie’s heart monitor.

Holy _shit_.

“But—but—but you have,” Eddie prompts, feeling all of thirteen years old again, like they’re gathered around asking Bill about kissing a girl for the first time.

Richie lifts his chin and gives Eddie a look as bland as oatmeal. “I don’t date,” he says a little more firmly. He stops hugging himself too, shifting his elbow onto the arm of the chair, spreading himself out, making himself bigger. Challenging.

Eddie doesn’t want to pick up the challenge. He’s too busy trying to work out where all the screaming klaxons in his head came from and how to turn them off. Holy _shit, holy shit._

If Richie doesn’t date men, but—he hears a steady beeping and reminds himself to breathe regularly, because there are a bunch of electrodes wired to his chest at the moment that are ratting out his pulse rate. He absolutely, absolutely _cannot think_ about Richie going out and having casual sex right now.

“You—uh, you don’t want to go back to Los Angeles?” he asks. “You don’t—I, uh.” He blinks several times, trying to reset his train of thought.

“No,” Richie says. His mild expression has changed a little, becoming harder; his arms are still spread like he’s sitting on a throne or something. He’s ready to fight with Eddie over this.

Eddie has to decide whether he’s going to fight with him.

“Why?” he asks.

Richie’s eyes are uncharacteristically serious; he does not give an inch. “Because you died,” he says sharply.

And that as a concept is pretty distracting. Eddie takes a breath, trying to keep his temper.

“I don’t,” he says, “want to be taken care of. _Listen_ ,” he adds, because Richie has opened his mouth and is definitely ready to argue. “I’ve been taken care of my whole life and I never needed it, and I’m sick of it. I don’t want—you, or Ben and Bev, or anyone else trying to do it. I’m—I’m done. Okay? I’m forty and I’m done.”

“What the fuck does that mean, _you’re done_?” Richie demands in return. “You’re not _giving up_.”

“Of course I’m not giving up,” Eddie says, incredulous. If he were giving up he’d allow all of the smothering to happen—he’d have told Myra exactly where he was and allowed her to kick his friends out of the waiting room and let her drag him home. “I’m—starting over. That’s what I’m doing. No more…” He doesn’t have a word to encompass it. “…of that.”

Richie tilts his head to the side, receptive, but his eyelids droop like he’s bored. “If I’m allowed to speak?” he drawls out.

“When has that ever stopped you?” Eddie demands, resigned.

Richie nods his head slowly, then lowers his gaze to inspect the back of his hand. Faux-casual again. Condescending, too. Looking for a spot to cut where it will hurt. “So aside from our rich and creative sex life, what exactly do you think I have in common with your mother?”

Eddie makes a revolted face.

“No, go on, I’m curious,” Richie says. “Even a little bit. Because I’m still not convinced I even qualify as an adult, and we both know she wasn’t human—“

“Richie.”

Richie’s jaw snaps shut and he grimaces, looking away toward the sink in the corner.

“I don’t want help,” Eddie says. He tries to put some finality into it, to close the book on the matter.

Richie turns his head and just looks at him. Some of the condescension fades, leaving him soft. Eddie’s not used to seeing that on him; he’s used to Richie performing, strategizing, dodging. Even now, he doesn’t really trust the look of acceptance Richie’s showing him, until Richie speaks.

“Okay,” he says, like it’s that easy. “So what do you want me to do?”

That’s it. That’s all he says. He agrees with Eddie and then asks him what he wants.

And.

Uh.

Lot of possible answers to that question.

But the faint resignation on Richie’s face—brows and eyes slanting down, mouth gone flat—definitely indicates a genre. Like Richie’s expecting him to say _go back to Los Angeles where you belong_ or something. And if Eddie were interested in doing the upright thing, the self-depriving thing, the reasonable thing, he’d tell Richie he doesn’t want to be a bother (he doesn’t) or to get in the way of Richie’s life (also true) and just let him go.

But.

Eddie fucking died.

And he definitely doesn’t grasp what that means at the moment, but he knows that a) it’s a very bad idea for him to be alone with his thoughts right now, and b) he just wants to be around Richie. The nice thing in the middle of all the horror that was coming back home was discovering that in spite of the years, in spite of the changes, in spite of the person Eddie became that he could feel sloughing off him like dead skin at the table, they all fit together like nothing changed. Bev said, amazed, _We all still love each other_ , and she was right. Eddie still loves them all in the same earth-quaking way he did when he was thirteen, and rediscovering them is like finding the places where he was dovetailed to accommodate their edges. There’s still room for them. All the space that Eddie was holding so carefully empty for all this time was because the Losers Club of 1989 had written DIBS all over it in clumsy capital letters.

If he says to Richie, _just be you_ that’s no better than _I love you_ at the moment. He feels too raw and open to keep that from coming out if he cuts close enough to it.

Richie is still watching him. He has one arm slung over the arm of the chair now, hand loose and fingers dangling casually, elegantly. He’s ignoring the trailing ribbon of the balloon and watching Eddie over his glasses, a distinctly un-Trashmouth-like move that makes Eddie feel pinned, somehow. Butterfly on a corkboard. It’s the kind of piercing stare he usually gets from Stan—are they at the point where they’re mimicking each other again? Picking up each other’s mannerisms—Stan doing Eddie’s cutting hand gestures and Bev bobbing her head like Richie and Ben adopting a little bit of Bill’s guilty pout?

_Please just be you,_ Eddie thinks. His heart monitor continues throbbing over his head. But he thinks Richie understands it too.

“Don’t treat me different,” he says, and it comes out all wrong: too urgent, too needy, almost a plea. “I can’t—you said, down there, you said I didn’t need—the placebos or—you said I was brave enough, basically. You can’t take that back now.” He finds a loose thread in the blanket and pushes his index finger through it, making a fist in the fabric so the thread loop constricts like a ring. “If you start treating me different I’m gonna go fucking insane, you don’t even know.”

Are they different people after all? Can Eddie shed adulthood like a skin and climb back into the odd brave person who was ready to die for his friends? He found him there in the dark. He thinks his name is _Eds._

“So—” Richie lifts his chin a little, one corner of his mouth pulling up. It’s like mid-afternoon; he needs a fucking shave, because just looking at him is making Eddie’s face itch. “—don’t be helpful.”

Eddie blinks at him once. The thread wrapped around his finger breaks.

“Like, even a little,” Richie says. “Just stand there, be the trashmouth, be lookout, watch you fall down the stairs and crack jokes.”

He’s saying it lightly, not like he’s trying to guilt Eddie or throw it back in his face. If he asked Myra to back off (he gave up on that after a while) she would ask him what she was supposed to do, just watch him struggle? But Richie sounds like Eddie’s ready to take him at his word as far as marching orders go.

“If I fall down the stairs, you can help me,” Eddie concedes. He’s not unreasonable.

“Help you fall down the stairs? Like, push you down the stairs?”

“If I fall down Tracy will put us each in a half-nelson, so you are allowed to disobey a direct order to prevent me from immediate physical harm.”

Richie’s smile widens. “In the interest of us not sharing one full nelson?”

“I don’t want to have to learn what a nelson is,” Eddie confirms. It has absolutely nothing to do with how nice it might be to be caught by Richie’s arms. He’s a grown man.

“So can I come to New York?”

Part of Eddie cries out _yes, please come to New York!_ It’s somewhere between the fear he felt when he thought Richie was going to walk out on him earlier and the possessive thought _I’m not done with him yet._ How bereft he felt when it was time to go home at the end of the day.

“Don’t make me regret it,” Eddie says.

“Thought you said I wasn’t supposed to treat you different,” Richie says, and reaches out for the ribbon of the balloon. “Per the terms of our contract, I have to make you regret it, Eds.”

Eddie recognizes a call to response when he hears it. Richie wants him to be Eddie, too.

“Don’t call me Eds,” he replies, finishing the ritual and sealing the deal.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Richie's sympathy balloon is, of course, the turducken of sympathy balloons from _Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. Can't find an image to link to, regrettably._


	5. With the Body

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Eddie takes off his bandages. Richie takes off his shirt.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much to [qianwanshi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/qianwanshi/pseuds/qianwanshi) for offering advice re: proper thirsting over arms, making sure that everyone's name is in the correct place, and making sure I wasn't spelling any words backwards.
> 
> Content warnings: painkillers, medical details discussed at length, more discussion of bodily functions, more medical inaccuracies, discussion of death, nerve damage, delicate gag reflex, discussion of drug abuse and rehabilitation, injuries, Eddie faints, an irreverent portrayal of Jesus, questionable dietary choices, name-brand candy, canonical murder.

Eddie comes off the morphine.

It turns out that he’s not actually doing as well as he thought he was.

“How are you feeling?” Dr. Fox asks him, the morning after his first night’s sleep minus the intravenous opioids.

Eddie stares at her. He’s kind of baffled, actually. He thought his body was fairly manageable, and now he discovers that western medicine is just full of all kinds of wonders. Devotee of prescription pills as he was for many years, he still had no idea.

“Ow?” he offers her weakly.

“Yeah, that sounds about right,” she says. “You’ll be taking painkillers by mouth for now. We still don’t want you getting up without help, so please call for a nurse instead of getting up on your own.”

She gives a stern look, like Eddie’s just ready to throw himself out of the bed. He’s not even ready to move his arms. He’s afraid that he’s just going to stay in this bed forever. His mother would love that. It just took forty years to break him.

“I promise not to get up on my own,” he says.

The last time he even brought up the subject, Sarah vanished and came back with a pamphlet titled _Call, Don’t Fall!_ And what’s worse, she handed Eddie one and left a couple on the visitors’ chairs for his friends when they came in. Richie spent the rest of his visit coming up with increasingly unlikely rhymes, finally escalating into something incredibly contrived involving autoerotic asphyxiation (“Angle, Don’t Strangle!”), which sent Eddie into a coughing fit.

“Good,” Dr. Fox says. “And while we’re on the subject. Nathan says that you’ve been reluctant to use the bedpan or urinal.” She means the plastic one that’s supposed to guide his stream into a small jug now that the catheter’s out; Eddie’s general reluctance to use a urinal in a public restroom has, for his entire adult life, been based on the opaque social etiquette of which urinal to use when one in the row is occupied.

Eddie wants to sigh at her in response, but he also doesn’t want to make his ribs angry by drawing a full breath. “Yeah, I don’t want to do that.” He’s been impaled through the torso. He feels like he ought to retain some agency.

“Well, good news—you have a urinary tract infection.”

Eddie stares at her and then says, “Motherfucker.” That’s a bad habit; he hasn’t cursed in front of a doctor in years. It’s Richie’s fault. “Sorry. How the—how can I possibly have a urinary tract infection. Aren’t I already on antibiotics?”

Nathan made him pee in a cup. At the time Eddie thought it was because they needed to see how his body was metabolizing his morphine, but also Nathan probably noticed how he was hissing and cursing under his breath when he tried to use the toilet, because that’s what happens when someone’s job is to watch you take a piss, they notice you cringing. Eddie tries to feel less resentful of Nathan for ratting him out.

“You were on antibiotics, but we’re pretty satisfied that your initial infection has cleared.”

Eddie raises his eyebrows. “My what?”

Dr. Fox grimaces and looks down. “Sorry. You had a fever almost immediately after your surgeries, but it cleared with antibiotics. We think that, combined with the anesthesia, is probably why you’re having memory loss. Your MRIs showed no cranial trauma or inflammation in the brain, so we’re pretty sure it’s not injury-related, except for the shock of the blood loss.”

“What got infected?” Eddie asks, because that’s the most important question at the moment.

“Your posterior incision,” Dr. Fox replies. “We were pretty sure it had cleared by now, based on your drainage and the actual site itself. Your healing looks very good, considering the environment. We think that the amount of blood loss helped flush organic material out of the wound, because we didn’t find any wood in the injury.”

Eddie cringes hard, trying to project squeamishness as a way to get around discussing the holes in his cover story as well as his actual body. “So I had an infection,” he prompts.

“You did,” she says. “Which means that this one is likely antibiotic-resistant to what we’ve been giving you. So we’re going to take a second urine sample, do antibiotic testing, and find an antibiotic to target that infection specifically. In the meantime, I’m increasing your required fluid intake. You’re going to be drinking eight ounces of water every half an hour, and if you feel the urge to urinate—” She gives him a hard look. “—you may have to use the urinal, if none of the nurses are available to escort you to the bathroom.”

Oh god. There are no words for how much Eddie does not want that to happen.

“Does it have to be a nurse?” he asks. He will ask Ben to carry him to the bathroom before he uses the bedpan. Ben is not only capable but he probably wouldn’t even hold it against Eddie.

“Every time you get up,” she says. “Out of bed, out of a chair, off of the toilet. As long as you’re in the hospital, we’re liable if you’re injured—and forgive me, but we’re also responsible if one of your friends tries to take you to the bathroom and you fall and are injured. Also we don’t want that to happen, and our nurses are really good at catching people when they collapse.”

“I have noticed that.”

It’s her turn to raise her eyebrows at him. “Have you collapsed?” She glances back down at his chart, probably checking to see if there's a note about a fainting episode that she's missed.

“No, they’re all just really strong.”

Dr. Fox looks appeased. “They have a lot of practice. So. Do we understand each other?”

“Can I bribe them to take me to the bathroom?”

“I’m afraid that would be unethical and might interfere with other patients’ care,” she says dryly. “How are your bowel movements?”

The rest of the brief rundown of Eddie’s major organ systems is just as unpleasant, and ends with her prescribing him a powdered laxative to mix into his beverages (“or pudding, if you prefer,” as if Eddie’s going to spoil perfectly good pudding like that) until he stops puking from constipation.

The hospital food is doing nothing to help his constant low-grade nausea, but it’s also not that different from the food he ate when he was living at home with Myra. Myra cooked, and he appreciated that because he hates cooking and never learned how to be any good at it, but she had a lot of the same hangups regarding food and foodborne illness that he did, aggravated by nutritional concerns about weight. Mealtimes were always stressful, and they functioned best when they didn’t have to comment on or think too much about what they were eating. The night after the dinner at Jade of the Orient, Eddie was so sick from just the departure from his gastronomic comfort zone (as well as probably all the alcohol, since he definitely binged on that too) that after they had that revelation about Bev’s prophetic dreams, he had to go up to his hotel bathroom and lay down with his head on the side of the porcelain bathtub and try to keep it all down.

“The good news is,” Dr. Fox says with a smile, because Eddie’s doing absolutely nothing to hide how miserable both his physical condition and this check-in are making him, “we’re reasonably sure that your lung is no longer leaking air. And the drainage from your chest tube is decreasing at a very promising rate.”

Eddie nods blandly, pretending he knows what that means.

“Which means,” she adds, her smile a little wider, “if you keep this up, we’re looking at removing your chest tube at the end of this week.”

If he had the energy he’d sit up; instead he just tilts his head back, shifting her in the frame that is his field of vision to give her better attention. “This week?” he asks. “Do you mean Friday or Sunday?”

“We’re looking at Friday,” she replies. “Because your injury was so traumatic, I’d like to keep you for another day after your tube is removed, just to make sure there are no complications, but you could be discharged as early as Sunday. Have you worked out what your plans are once you’re out of here?”

He lets his head tip back a little further, taking the support of the pillow. “Well, I live in New York,” he says. “So. I’ll be going back there.”

“And is there someone at home who will be there with you?” she asks. “Or do you live on your own?”

“No, I’ll—I’ll have someone there,” he says. “My—I have friends offering to stay with me, so. I won’t be alone.”

“Okay,” she says. “You’ll be driving? Or, traveling by car—I don’t want you operating a vehicle.”

He nods.

“Good. You need to stay off of planes until you’re otherwise instructed,” she says. “Do you have a PCP at home?”

A PCP who’s been happily prescribing things to soothe Eddie’s internal and Myra’s external anxieties for the last ten years.

“I’m—in the market for a new one,” he says.

“Hmm,” she says. “New York City?”

“No,” he says. “No, upstate.”

“Well. You’ll have plenty of instructions for your discharge, about what to look out for with your incisions, the kinds of exercises you should do at home, the kind of physical therapy you should receive. We’ll give you print-outs so you can refer to them.”

“I normally have fairly good memory,” Eddie says, and then remembers that not only did he forget the first eighteen years of his life, he also forgot about his wife in favor of his car this week. But he doesn’t want to walk that back in front of his doctor.

“Standard procedure,” she says. “Also something your caregivers can refer to. Before you’re discharged we’ll schedule your follow-up appointment—will you be able to come back to Sovereign Light so that we can see how your outpatient healing is progressing?”

Eddie is reasonably sure now that he might as well quit his job, because if his job gets in the way of him healing from his gaping chest wound, he needs not to have it in the first place. He nods.

“We’re looking at anywhere between one and three weeks for you to come back for your checkup,” she says. “And remember—I’m not promising discharge on Sunday. If something happens—if your lung starts leaking, or if you have problems with your heart or breathing, or if you develop a fever, we might want to keep you a bit longer. Understand?”

“I understand,” he says.

“Good,” she says. “I’m going to get a nurse in here with your oral painkillers—I’ve prescribed them every four hours, but if you’re in unmanageable pain we can revisit that. We’re not medicating to no pain—especially not after your response to the morphine earlier.”

Eddie feels in a weird way like she’s blaming him for passing out, when he not only had absolutely no control over how much morphine he received while he was unconscious, but he was also there and didn’t exactly enjoy the experience. He tries to put aside some of that sensitivity and focus on his impending release.

“Do you have any more questions for me?” Dr. Fox asks.

“Yeah,” he says slowly. He tries to assess how much he wants to get into this right now, but he has a lot of free time on his hands and his sleep schedule is pretty bad at this point in his life; he has a lot of time to lie in the dark and think about his situation. “Uh, you said that there were… events, while I was in surgery. That I had some events.”

She lowers the clipboard and tucks it into her side, then nods slowly, so deeply that Eddie can see the part in her hair from his recline on the bed, and then back up. “Yeah,” she says. “You went into cardiac arrest during your initial surgery at Derry Home Hospital. I wasn’t there and I can’t speak to the events themselves, but when you arrived they told us that you had two periods of cardiac arrest during which you had to be resuscitated.”

“Oh,” he says. It wasn’t here. He feels a little weird asking her about it, because she also got this secondhand, but he also feels he really ought to have been told that he died, first thing when he woke up. “Uh—do you know how long?”

“The first time, about one minute,” she says. “The second time, about four minutes. You were on a ventilator. Your heart responded to the defibrillation, but you did have a brief period where you had no heart activity.”

“Oh,” he says again, and looks down at his right hand. It lies curled on his thigh on top of the cream blanket—they haven’t taken away his second blanket after his panic attack, and the part of him that’s still fucking cold is fiercely glad of that. They took out his IV and now he’s not so afraid to move the arm, now that he’s not afraid of jostling either the needle or the plastic tube, but its clumsiness is more pronounced now. Like trying to walk on a foot that’s still asleep.

“We think the interrupted circulation may have resulted in some nerve damage,” she says, following his line of sight. “How does that arm feel?”

“Uh,” he says, trying to think of an answer that isn’t _cold_. Then he reconsiders and says, “A little cold? And—clumsy? Like I’m trying to use my left hand instead of my right, except I have two left hands.”

“Is it numb?”

“A little,” he says. “I can still feel things with it—I can feel this.” He rubs his palm back and forth across the waffle weave of the blanket, feeling the roughness against his skin. “And I can feel cold, like—” He reaches out and touches the safety rail on the right side of his bed. “It just doesn’t seem to react like it used to—like, if I try to make a fist, I can. It just doesn’t feel right.” He shows her, holding out his fist with his palm facing up. The cotton ball taped to the inside of his forearm faces the ceiling. “My fingers don’t line up where I’m used to.”

“Uh-huh?” she asks. “Can you sit up for me?”

She comes around to the right side of his bed and puts a hand on his back to help guide him into an upright position. Then she puts one hand on his shoulder and asks him to extend his arm, carefully touching his elbow and following down to his wrist and then his fingers. She has him twist his wrist to turn his whole arm, asking him what hurts and where.

“Okay,” she says, helping him lower his arm back to his side without his whole back rebelling. “I think we might want to schedule some nerve conduction tests, maybe EMG to rule out muscle problems. We’re pretty sure we know the cause, so I don’t want to do a nerve biopsy. Have you broken this arm before?”

“Yeah,” he says.

She nods. “Yeah, we saw it on your X-rays. How old were you?”

“Thirteen,” he says.

“It… looks like it was set by an amateur?” she says slowly.

Eddie closes his eyes. “It was,” he replies. “My friend did it.”

She blinks at him. “Also a thirteen-year-old?”

“Yeah. He saw it on TV.”

“Oh my god,” she says. “Did you have radial nerve damage before this?”

He shrugs. “Probably not. I’ve always been pretty healthy.”

* * *

He reconsiders that, later, when Sarah brings him his cup of water and a smaller plastic cup with some pills resting in it. As soon as the pills hit his tongue he gets a wave of nausea that makes his throat close up. He used to be so good at dry-swallowing medicine that he could shake them out into his palm and gulp them down while he was driving a car on the phone. Now he gags on the pills and water and coughs a little.

“Not good with pills?” Sarah asks, a little concerned.

He clears his throat and drinks more water. “Guess not,” he says.

“My mom’s like that. My grandma used to hide her pills in peanut butter and she would still find them and spit them out.” She smiles. “My dog does that too—her dad gives them to her in hot dog, and she eats the hot dog and then drops the pills on the floor.”

Eddie elects to ignore the idea of a dog having a human father. “What kind of dog do you have?”

“Shepherd,” she says. “She’s really smart, but she’s also an idiot.”

Eddie nods. “I know a little bit about that.”

“Oh yeah? Do you have a dog?”

He shakes his head. “No, I just have some wonderfully stupid friends.”

Sarah beams at him.

He sets his cup down on his little tray. “What’s your dog’s name?” If she’s talking to him, it will distract him from this bland oatmeal that is his breakfast.

“Daisy Belle,” she replies. “Like the song.” She sings a little of it: _“Daisy, Daisy.”_

Eddie frowns. He’s pretty sure he remembers that song, but only in the context of a _Peanuts_ cartoon. “Is that one about a bicycle?”

“It is! A tandem bike.”

He’s thirteen years old, clutching his broken arm to his chest and perched in the basket of a bicycle as Mike pushes the wheels over the broken ground of Neibolt House, his teeth chattering like it’ll do anything to make him feel better.

“I don’t like Pomeranians,” Eddie declares.

Sarah shakes her head in agreement. “Nah, big dogs all the way.”

“Not too big,” Eddie says. “No dog bigger than me.”

She laughs. “No Russian bear dogs for you?”

“No.”

“I feel that. I only have fifty pounds on my girl. My husband’s six-four, though, so when we were training her not to jump—” She mimes pushing at something. “—he only had to flip her on her back like twice, and she never did it again.”

Eddie stares at her. “Your husband is six-four?” She’s five feet tall. She fits under his armpit when he stands up.

She shrugs one shoulder. “Yeah. His brother’s six-one, our brother-in-law is five-eleven. I like big dogs, big men.”

Eddie lowers his gaze to his oatmeal bowl and says, “I feel like I ought to salute you, but I don’t know why.”

Sarah laughs again, and then her gaze flicks to the side, looking for something to dwell on while Eddie eats his breakfast. “Hey, can I ask you something?”

And maybe he’s a little paranoid because the first thing he thinks of is _please don’t ask me about my relationship to Richie, I’m forty years old and I don’t want to have to say ‘it’s complicated’ out loud._

“Sure,” he says, full of oatmeal and pain.

“What’s the deal with that balloon?”

It slowly rotates in the corner. The unicorn’s wild eye seems to roll.

* * *

The nice thing about Mike is that at the moment he’s so clearly brimming with his own excitement about his travel, it forms a kind of white noise for Eddie’s baseline energy level. It’s a low-stress interaction—Mike pulls the chair up beside the bed and sits so that Eddie can see as he shows him the trip itinerary he’s building. Eddie feels comfortable with the level of sleepy interest he can bring to the table.

“Because it’s the first national park in the world,” Mike says, quiet glee on his face. “Not just America—the world. I know people are always saying that North America is bigger than you think it is, Europe is older than you think it is—but I think there’s something there, you know?”

Eddie blinks a few times, trying to figure out whether Mike means that Yellowstone might also be harboring a demon alien. “What kind of thing?”

“Like—rhetorically. Symbolically. There’s a lot of loss to the idea that the natural beauty of Europe that _could_ have been preserved in national parks… the idea wasn’t around then. You know?”

Eddie doesn’t have a lot of opinions about the natural beauty of Europe, or indeed natural beauty in general. He likes civilization, he likes cities despite the grime of New York. There’s something reassuring about the presence of infrastructure, of accessible transport, of the ability to get to where you need to go, of variety at your fingertips. A city is what you make of it—for all that for most of his NY residency he made very little of it. But he still associates the countryside with rural Maine and the feeling he got of longing, walking through the old trainyard. The desire to be anywhere but here.

But that’s not entirely true. The Barrens were a different sort of comfort.

“There are still forests in Europe,” he says, nonplussed. “The Black Forest? Are you going to Europe?”

“Maybe,” Mike says. “Depends on whether or not Bill’s still there by the time I finish with North America.” At Eddie’s confused eyebrows he explains, “I could fly in to where he’s staying, do touristy things, get a flight from England to the continent, take trains. I’m ready for America to have a high-speed rail, man.”

Eddie sighs, “I like trains.”

Which is of course when Richie walks in, plastic bag in hand, just in time to hear Eddie sound very stupid. He doesn’t acknowledge it—yet—but he instead says, “All right, I have completed your fetch quest, may I please be rewarded with the hand of the princess now?”

Eddie scowls at him. Mike straightens up and as soon as he’s less close the antiseptic smell of the hospital fades back into his notice again. Mike always smells nice. Eddie smells like disinfectant.

“What’d you get?” Mike asks.

Richie reaches into the bag and starts pulling out packets of candy. “Jellybeans, peppermints, Jolly Ranchers, Junior Mints, Skittles, butterscotch, Lifesaver gummies, Swedish fish, and a two-pound bag of assorted Hershey chocolates.” This last he hoists up and waves at Eddie. “What’re you starting with?”

“Skittles,” Eddie says. Richie throws a movie-theater sized bag of Skittles onto his lap and he and Mike pretend not to notice while Eddie struggles to tear it open. His index finger and thumb don’t want to cooperate with the perforation.

“Are you celebrating something?” Mike asks, tone slow and careful.

“Tentative release on Sunday,” Eddie replies. He gives up and rips the bag open with his teeth. A spray of rainbow-colored pellets spills down his front and land on the blanket.

“That’s great!” Mike says. “What’s your plan?”

“Ben’s house,” Eddie replies. He knows he’s being uncommunicative, but he’s both tired and distracted with scientific experimentation. Holding the bag in his right hand, he shakes some Skittles into his left palm and then takes a deep breath. Then he tosses the candy into his mouth like he’s throwing back pills.

The second the pellets hit his soft palate he gags. He tries to keep it mild, to conceal his sudden retching from Mike and Richie in case they have questions, but some of his revulsion must come through. He holds his hand over his mouth, trying to hide the way he almost wants to spit them out.

“You okay?” Mike asks.

Eddie works the candy into the front of his mouth and begins chewing. Searching for a distraction, he asks, “What the fuck did they do to the green ones?”

“Oh shit, you didn’t know?” Richie throws himself down on the open chair; it creaks dangerously. “They changed them to green apple. Like, years ago.”

“How is that any better than fucking lime?” Eddie demands, muffled around his mouth full of candy. Once the Skittles are pulverized they go down fine without making him nauseous; he holds the bag out to Richie. Richie leans forward and takes them without question. “Jellybeans.”

Richie trades him the Skittles for a pack of Jelly Belly 49 flavors. “Are you going through some shit here, or can I eat these?” he asks, holding up the red bag.

“Go for it.” Eddie has an easier time opening up the plastic on this bag. Different material, thinner cellophane or something.

“Hell yeah,” Richie says, and pours Skittles into his open mouth. Eddie does not watch this time.

Mike does, in something like horror. “Isn’t your dad a dentist?”

“Retired,” Richie says. “And if you think he’s disappointed in me now, you should have seen me like when I was just out of rehab, I could have done sponsorships for Skittles.”

That does make Eddie look up. Richie is eating more Skittles. Mike has a patient look on his face that tells Eddie this is not new information for him.

“Rehab?” Eddie asks.

Richie blinks twice and swallows his mouthful of candy. “Yeah, man, it was in the papers and everything. Like two-thousand…” He tilts his head to the side and his gaze flicks up, visibly counting. “2013?”

“Oh,” Eddie says. It’s recent. Not that there’s any period of time that he’d be cool with Richie having some kind of substance abuse problem, but three years ago is really recent, and Richie has been really stressed lately.

“You knew,” Richie says, looking at Mike, as though this is nothing more significant than a vacation Richie posted Facebook photos of. Mike nods. Richie smiles. “You fucking stalker,” he says affectionately.

“I had very little going for me in my life,” Mike says.

“Happy to provide that Schadenfreude,” Richie says. He glances back at Eddie and holds up the bag of Skittles, shaking it so that there’s a dull rattling sound from within it. “Anyway, cravings respond to inadvisable quantities of sugar.”

“Cravings,” Eddie repeats, and then shakes his head. “You don’t have to—“

“Cocaine,” Richie says patiently. There’s a moment of faintly awkward silence before he sings, _“She don’t lie, she don’t lie, she don’t lie.”_

Awkward silence is replaced by flat incomprehension.

Eddie asks, “Is that Eric Clapton?”

Mike says, “ _Oh_ , it’s Eric Clapton. I just thought he was being weird.”

“I mean, he was absolutely being weird.”

“Tough crowd,” Richie says. “Anyway, what are your other demands, my liege?”

“Well,” says Mike.

Richie blows a raspberry.

“My clothes,” Eddie says, because his ass is definitely currently touching these hospital sheets. Which are also not changed every day, and Eddie is still in desperate need of a shower, so it is as pimpled as his face and back at the moment. “New shoes. Since the hospital probably burned mine for being…” He tilts his head to the side, trying to indicate _dragged through a sewer and full of my blood_.

The jellybeans also activate his gag reflex. When he bites through them with his incisors, however, that nausea fades a little. Since Richie seems a little busy at the moment, Eddie hands the jellybeans to Mike.

“An insult to life and property?” Richie suggests.

“Yeah, that.”

“No problem,” Richie says. “I’ll get you new shoes before you make your escape attempt. What are you, size three?”

“Fuck off,” Eddie says.

“Two and a half?”

“Give me the fucking Junior Mints.”

The Junior Mints do not make Eddie sick. He assumes it’s because they’re larger than the Skittles or the jellybeans. Eddie knows that the mint flavor doesn’t actually do anything for his dental health, but it does make him feel better about the state of his breath. He brushes his teeth gingerly in the morning and the evening, during his first and last bathroom trips of each day, but the hole in his face makes him anxious about brushing with any real dedication.

He doesn’t know what a week of being seriously injured and receiving all of his medication intravenously instead of popping pills the way he did under his own power, but now he knows that he’s conditioned in some way to get sick at the very suggestion he might be swallowing a pill. It’s the shape of the candy that’s getting to him. He can only hope that will help him to commit to his new resolution, now that Bill’s thrown out all his pills.

* * *

Sarah says, “Today’s the day!”

Eddie blinks at her. It’s Thursday, not Friday as he expected. “Am I getting my chest tube out?” he asks.

“Not today,” she says. “Barring any unforeseen events, tomorrow. Today you’re gonna look at your incisions.”

He feels his eyebrows climb up toward his hairline. “Oh,” he says, somewhat alarmed. He’d like to think that he’s brave about his injuries, especially since he… survived them, in a manner of speaking. But maybe the care that the nurses have taken to keep him from seeing his incisions has built it up in his mind. He feels a little pulse of anxiety at the idea. “Okay.”

“When you’re home, it’s going to be important for you to check for any changes that could indicate an infection,” she says. “They’re starting to heal—that’s why we’re releasing you—but if you have any fluid draining from the sites, write down the amount, the color, and the smell. You’ll need to talk to the doctor about that when you come back for your follow-up.”

Eddie is not enamored by the idea of writing down the smell of his own chest pus, but there has been very little about this entire experience that has been pleasant. “Okay,” he says.

He can sit up now on his own and support his own weight while Sarah removes his bandages, still talking.

“You don’t have stitches in the wound itself,” she says. “Aside from repairing the damage to blood vessels, and closing up your chest after repairing your lung—but that’s not in the original wound itself. And that’s a good thing, because you had an infection immediately after surgery and you don’t want material in the wound when it’s draining like that.”

“Okay,” Eddie says. He keeps glancing down to where she’s working steadily at his chest. He still has ring-shaped bruising on his chest from where he eventually picked off his suction cups from the heart monitor, but she’s very careful peeling off the waterproof bandage.

“Ready?” she asks.

He decides that watching is not going to help this process and closes his eyes. “All right.”

His skin stings as she pulls off the waterproof bandage. He continues feeling weirdly self-conscious about his nipples.

“Okay,” she says.

Eddie opens his eyes, and then he’s not so concerned about his nipples anymore, because his injury is kind of a feature dominating his entire chest. Purple and green bruising stretches across his ribs, far beyond the boundaries of either the stab wound or the surgical incision. The closer to the center of the injury the darker the bruising gets, until it’s almost black. The incision is, in comparison, pretty clean, with tiny neat dark blue stitches going up almost to his collarbone and almost down to his navel.

And the wound itself… When he looks at it, some part of his brain so deep says _You should not have a hole there, your body is wrong, wrong, wrong_ —that he doesn’t realize he’s starting to pass out until sparks start coming up in his field of vision. Then he blinks and he realizes that he can’t really see because his eyes seem overtaken by gray fog.

“I’m passing out,” he says to Sarah, because it’s important she know that.

“Gotcha,” Sarah says. She puts one hand on his temple and the other on his shoulder, and guides him back down onto his right side. “Can you tuck your hand under your head?”

Eddie has no problem tucking his hand under his head and bending his knees. After a moment she pulls the blanket up over him to keep him warm. Eddie focuses on breathing and thinks about that feeling of clarity he got when he was bleeding out, the realization that nothing had been wrong with him after all this time. He meditates on it.

Sarah brings him some water and offers it to him in little sips. Eddie apologizes for his faint heart. “It’s all right,” she says. “The last time I had blood drawn I didn’t faint when I was in the chair, but I started to faint the next day when I took the bandage off. Seeing the bruise.”

“I didn’t know bruising could do that,” Eddie says.

“Yeah,” she replies, her tone resigned acceptance. “The worst part was, I was on the toilet and everything.”

That makes Eddie laugh, and he wraps his left arm carefully around his torso to support himself.

“Maybe we should look at it while you’re lying down, just to get you accustomed to it?” Sarah suggests.

So they do that. Sarah peels the blanket off his chest again and Eddie tries a kind of exposure therapy with looking at his own injuries, glancing down at his chest and then looking up at the balloon. The balloon is the antithesis of a gaping chest wound. He wonders if association with his injury is going to affect his perception of Jesus in general, as Jesus stares back at him from atop the unicorn.

Stan and Patty come to visit him later that day. His hospital gown is tied behind his neck again and he’s as decent as he can be while in the hospital bed and not wearing nearly enough layers. For some reason the fact that he has a hole punched through his body makes him feel less uncomfortable about his vulnerable state of dress. His body feels both like it does and doesn’t belong to him, and he’s in enough pain at the moment that he doesn’t have the energy to care about it.

“Richie said you wanted candy,” Patty says. “My kids are really into these.” From her purple Scandinavian backpack—one of the expensive ones Eddie associates with college students—she produces a box of Japanese chocolate biscuits labeled _Pocky_. They all sit around and eat them, letting them hang out of their mouths like cigarillos. Eddie feels like a 1920s flapper.

“So you’re going to stay with Ben in New York for a bit?” Stan asks.

He nods. If Richie were here, he’d put two Pocky in his mouth and do the walrus tusk trick. Eddie won’t do that, but he’s definitely thinking about it.

“Are you taking Trashmouth with you?” Stan asks.

Eddie blinks blandly at him. “Ben and Beverly are going to be traveling,” he says. He wonders whether it would be appropriate to suggest he thinks she’s avoiding her abusive husband. The fact that he has to wonder about it makes him think it’s probably a bad idea to bring it up. “So he asked me to house sit. But…” He grimaces and his Pocky snaps; he catches the rest of the biscuit stick in his left palm. “I’m not allowed to drive while I’m on heavy painkillers.”

“That’s a good call,” Patty says. She has opened up a second box of Pocky. This one is pink instead of red and has a strawberry icon on the front. The part of Eddie that knows that sugar is addictive and has consumed an awful lot of it this week is very curious about them.

“And I’ve been told… repeatedly… that I’m going to need assistance.” He crunches his Pocky and swallows before he says, “I’ve been thinking about hiring an in-house nursing service.”

“Why?” Stan asks.

Eddie blinks at him. “Because the last time I left my medical health in Richie’s hands I spent the next thirty years being told that my arm looks like it was set by an amateur.”

Stan snorts. “Yeah, that’s fair.” He holds his hand out to Patty. “May I have more?”

“I share with you.” She places a stick in his hand.

“You’re so nice.”

“I be your friend.”

Stan’s smile is somehow tucked-in, like he wants to hide it, but it’s nothing less than besotted. Eddie stares at them, somewhat bewildered by the display of affection. From _Stan_ of all people. When he looks back up at Eddie he’s all business again. “What kind of help do you need?”

Eddie grimaces. “I don’t know. Lifting things. Picking up prescriptions.” That one makes Eddie incredibly anxious. He doesn’t like the idea of having to take more pills, but he also doesn’t like the idea of there being an intermediary between the pharmacist putting the pills in the bottle and Eddie shaking the pills out. It’s absolutely related to his mother, but he had that kind of pet peeve with Myra as well. “I still can’t get my arms over my head.”

When Sarah took his bandages off, she also walked him through the process of doing some exercises he’ll have to do on his own once he’s released. They seem to involve sitting in a chair and holding a towel over his head. When she supported his elbow he was able to lift his arm that far, but lowering his arm again felt like his whole back was going to split.

“So you’ll need food,” Stan says. “Are you sure you want to trust Trashmouth with that?”

Eddie wobbles his head because he wants to shrug but he’s slowly learning not to do that. “I trust him to order takeout.”

“Not Chinese?” Stan asks.

Eddie scowls. He’s just accepted that there’s a new world of culinary flavor out there. “I’m not letting that clown take Chinese food away from me.”

“That’s the spirit!” Stan says, and seems to toast him with a candy biscuit.

“Would you like another Pocky?” Patty asks him.

He accepts the strawberry Pocky she hands him. Both flavors are very good.

Stan and Patty are going back to Georgia. Eddie’s actually a little bit surprised that they’re still here. They seem to have every intention of sticking around Bangor until he’s released.

“Do you want to have, like, a celebratory meal before we all split up?” Stan asks.

It won’t be exactly the same, because Bill has already left. But Eddie says, “Yeah. Let’s get dinner.” Then he remembers: “I have no access to my money right now.”

“Man, you died,” Stan says. “Do you think you’re buying your own dinner?”

“Yes,” Eddie says, frowning.

“No,” Stan says.

“Yes.”

“No.”

“Eddie,” Patty says, her voice suddenly taking on a slightly admonishing tone. Parts of Eddie’s brain that he hasn’t accessed since he was in grade school suddenly sit up and pay attention. Eddie was the kid who had to go cry in the bathroom when the teacher yelled at him, which considering that Richie Tozier was one of his closest friends, made being seven through ten years old very difficult, until he developed a thicker skin. “We are so happy that you are okay. You should let us buy you dinner as a treat.”

Stan says nothing but he leans back a little, the corners of his smile becoming faintly satisfied. Eddie can read the warning quite plainly: _Don’t upset my wife_.

“I need a new phone, too,” Eddie says. “So I’ll have to do that before I get out of Bangor.”

Stan nods.

“And,” Patty says, some of that urgency still in her voice. Eddie glances back at her. Her eyes are just _huge_ , like cartoon-character large behind her glasses. “You know you are always welcome to come visit us, when you feel up to it.”

Oh no. That urgent thread in her voice is sincerity.

“I—thank you,” Eddie says. He clears his throat a little bit. “If you’d like to come visit once I have a housing situation worked out.”

Apparently Stan and Patty are planning on going to Buenos Aires in the near future, but they assure him that they’ll let the Losers know about the dates so they can make arrangements around them.

Eddie has a future now.

* * *

Richie leaves Eddie his clothes on Saturday night at the end of visiting hours, so that Eddie can be ready to go when he comes to pick him up on Sunday. The shoes are new—running shoes, nothing too extravagant. They make Eddie feel weird as he laces them up, in a way that has nothing to do with the pressure on either side of his feet. Something about the fact of Richie buying him shoes. If he dwells on it for too long he feels like squirming, so he tries not to dwell on it.

His clothes are familiar. Reassuring, kind of. Richie went into his suitcase and pulled out underwear—and what a relief it is to be wearing his own underwear again—and socks, and his own trousers. No belt—one of the casualties of Its cavern. He keeps fidgeting with his waistband—he’s always been kind of skinny, but now his hipbones are basically the only thing keeping his pants up. He’s almost afraid to move, so he keeps sitting on the end of the hospital bed and tries not to fidget.

Nathan is there to offer Eddie help with his balance while he gets dressed. When Eddie squints at his folded shirt, Nathan considers and then nods in understanding.

Eddie wears mostly polos, and this is one of them. But polos are among those shirts that require him to be able to lift his arms over his head. And he can’t do that right now without feeling like he’s being stabbed again.

“I can support your arms,” Nathan offers. He does that sometimes when Eddie has to do his stretching exercises. Lowering his arms again when he’s done is almost as bad as trying to lift them.

Eddie’s considering the logistics of trying to take off his shirt again at the end of the day. He sighs and then says, “Yeah, this isn’t gonna work.”

“We can get you a shirt from the gift shop,” Nathan suggests.

Eddie looks around at him and slowly realizes that the incredibly bland look on Nathan’s face is actually deeply ironic. “To commemorate my stay?” he asks.

Nathan nods slowly. “To commemorate your stay.”

But a t-shirt from the Sovereign Light Hospital gift shop has the same limitations that Eddie’s polo does, and Eddie doesn’t want to have to ask for help with getting undressed at the end of the day. He puts his jacket on over his bare chest and zips it up carefully. There are patches of numbness around his incisions, but he can still feel the cold of the zipper teeth where they rest on his bare chest.

Dr. Fox gives him the rundown of how he’s supposed to behave once he is out under his own power. “Keep your bandage on for forty-eight hours,” she says. She means the one under his armpit from where his chest tube was installed. Eddie’s the kind of machine who has things installed in him now. “Make sure that you keep to your medication schedule. If it doesn’t relieve your pain—and I know you have a high pain tolerance, Mr. Kaspbrak, but don’t subject yourself to strain unnecessarily—please call. Do not drink alcohol, do not drive a motor vehicle while you’re taking your pain medication.”

Eddie blinks up at her. “Or operate heavy machinery?” he asks.

She gives a faint smile. “Or operate heavy machinery. Are you likely to be operating heavy machinery in the near future?”

He tilts his head from side to side. “You never know when you’re going to get the urge to operate a forklift.”

“I can honestly say, I do not know when that urge might come upon me.” She nods and looks back down at her clipboard. “But it better not come upon you while you’re still on the medication. You can supplement your meds with ibuprofen as your incisions heal and as you start to taper your prescription. Do _not_ stop taking it cold turkey, you might get some nasty withdrawal symptoms.”

Eddie, who is accustomed to telling his doctors literally every tiny concern that he might have in the hopes of getting someone to fix the overwhelming sense of physical wrongness within him, tries not to grimace at that.

“Your pain level will probably increase as you increase your level of activity,” she says. “That’s normal. When you start to feel pain, that’s when you want to take your medicine. It can take half an hour to forty-five minutes to kick in, so don’t try to tough it out.” She narrows her eyes at him. Eddie feels himself smile a little at that. She’s different from most doctors he’s had, and he kind of likes the idea that she knows him enough to be suspicious of him.

“If the bandage from your chest tube incision gets wet within the next twenty-four hours, change it immediately. But after today, if the incision has no drainage—check the bandage when you take it off and see if it’s wet—you can leave that incision uncovered. If you still have drainage, however, you should keep it covered. Sometimes it might stop draining for a period of time and then start up again—that’s fine, that’s normal, we can talk about it at your follow-up appointment. Just make sure that you take note of any weird smells, weird colors that look like pus, anything that might indicate infection. Call us if you have any questions.”

“Okay,” Eddie says, though he’s privately resolving not to have questions if he can avoid it. “When can I take a shower?”

“Tuesday,” she tells him. “Forty-eight hours from your discharge.”

Eddie blinks at her. “That seems… arbitrary.”

“You seem like the kind of man to set a phone timer for forty-eight hours,” she replies.

This is true.

“Nuh-uh,” Eddie says intelligently.

She raises one eyebrow. “Oh?”

“No, I don’t have a phone.”

She does smile at that, lowering her gaze to her clipboard again. “Wash gently with soap—unscented soap, trust me—and pat gently with a towel to dry them after showering. You can leave them uncovered unless they’re draining. Do _not_ take a bath.”

“Okay,” Eddie says. Even as a kid, he never liked baths. As soon as he got over the toddler fear of loud noises, he was in the shower. He has memories of being anxious about getting water in his eyes, so he wore sunglasses to protect them. He’s pretty sure his mother had a photo of that—him as a toddler, naked, with sunglasses too large for his face as he stood in the little shower stall.

“We’re giving you some informational handouts on your diet for your recovery. You’ll want to increase your protein and your calories, and drink plenty of water to prevent constipation.”

Eddie makes a resigned grunt.

“Call if you go more than two days without a bowel movement. You should aim for thirty minutes of exercise every day—walking and climbing stairs. Don’t overdo it, keep it light. No sexual activity for three weeks—you don’t want to get sweat in your incisions—and then afterwards wait for your incisions to heal, don’t do anything that will cause pain or fatigue. Don’t overdo it.”

His mouth is open. He consciously closes it and then manages, “Okay.”

She makes him sign some forms and then he waits in his own chair, his stack of instructional handouts and his folded shirt in his lap. Tracy asked him careful questions about who was picking him up and then instructed him to call when Richie arrives. But Richie comes in with his phone blasting ACDC without speakers or headphones or anything, so Eddie is sure the whole ward is aware of his arrival.

“Really?” Eddie asks over the sound of “Back in Black.”

Richie grins at him. “Really!”

“Tracy’s around here somewhere,” Eddie says.

Richie murmurs, “Oh shit” and quickly turns off the music. He drops his phone back in his pocket and then tucks his hands back in them. Then one of his eyebrows goes up and he squints at Eddie.

Eddie resists the urge to shrink a little further in his jacket. “What?”

Richie lets his head tilt to the side lazily. “Are you naked under there?”

“What?” He hunches his shoulders and feels the stretch of the adhesive on his back. The teeth of his zipper scrape against his throat. “Everyone is naked under their clothes, Richie!”

“Not Ben,” Richie says. “You seen how many shirts that guy wears? He’s just like… shirts all the way down. Meanwhile, it’s still fucking cold in this hospital room and your nipples tell me you can still feel it—”

“Jesus Christ,” Eddie says, and covers his chest with his hands. His stack of papers goes sliding off his lap onto the floor. He glances down but his jacket is thick enough he’s pretty sure that Richie can’t actually see his nipples poking through it, and he’s just being an asshole.

“—so I’m guessing there’s something wrong with your shirt,” Richie continues, unfazed.

Eddie glowers at the floor. “Can’t lift my arms over my head,” he says.

Richie blinks once. “Can Purple Haze lift your arms?”

He lifts his eyes to glare at him. “Tracy’s not coming home with me.”

“Not with that attitude, she’s not,” Richie says.

Eddie rolls his eyes. “You can’t be like that about people at work.”

“Be like what?”

“Be like…” He struggles for words, but Richie is looming and filling up the doorway and he’s not sure how to verbalize it.

“I’m not being like anything,” Richie says. “You don’t want help.”

“I don’t want help,” he confirms.

Richie stands there for a moment, watching him. Eddie can see wheels turning behind his eyes. Then Richie shrugs and starts taking off his jacket.

“Uh,” Eddie says.

Richie’s wearing his usual uniform of short-sleeved button-down shirt over a t-shirt, under his new leather jacket. It’s not a Hawaiian shirt, but it does have a repeating pattern of bright colored lines over it. The t-shirt’s black. Richie drops his jacket onto the spare chair and starts unbuttoning his shirt.

Again Eddie manages, “Uh.”

“I’m not helping,” Richie says.

Eddie doesn’t know where to look. Richie did this once in the Jade of the Orient—not the taking off his shirt, but the peeling off his jacket. Eddie was more than a little drunk and happier than he’d ever been in his life and Richie had a straining tendon in his forearm and Eddie had no words of his own, so he resorted to some _South Park_ he’d seen once upon a time. Myra would never have approved of him watching that, so he only saw it when he was traveling for work in a hotel room by himself. He felt like that, in the moment.

_Let’s take our shirts off and kiss._

Richie shrugs out of his outer shirt. It’s a casual motion—he does it every day, and pays the gesture no more mind than he seems to when he walks through the door. He rolls his shoulders back to pull his arms out of the sleeves and his t-shirt pulls taut across his chest. He’s. So fucking wide. What the fuck. He still wears his outer shirts big but at some point in adulthood Richie learned how to buy a t-shirt that fits him, so Eddie can see planes where the breadth of his shoulders smoothes down into his pectorals, clear defined lines in his biceps as he works the shirt back and forth to pull it off, and then he holds the shirt out to Eddie.

“Try that,” Richie says.

“I—” Eddie realizes he’s staring and jerks his eyes down to the outstretched shirt. Slowly he realizes that the short vertical stripes are a pattern of watches. It rides the line between preppy and tacky and somehow comes out the other side as appropriate for Richie Tozier. It’s nothing that Eddie would wear of his own accord.

He wants it. Like, really wants it.

Slowly he takes the shirt out of Richie’s hand, carefully not touching his fingers. The fabric’s warm to the touch. Maybe Eddie’s imagining it. He glances up at Richie, who reaches for his leather jacket and slides an arm through the sleeve—Eddie can’t trust himself to watch that any longer, so he jerks his gaze down to the shirt. Eddie slowly, awkwardly, turns in his chair so that his back is to Richie, and unzips his jacket.

His shoulders don’t want to cooperate, but he can pull each side of the jacket down one at a time. His arms don’t want to lift, but they can stretch just fine, and he gets one arm through the sleeve of Richie’s shirt. It’s not actually as warm as it feels—he knows that intellectually—but he’s aware of how exposed he is in this cold white hospital room with the waterproof bandage on his back and the other one under his armpit, and there’s something psychological about coverage. His range of motion is, predictably, better on the side of his body he didn’t have a tube installed in. He buttons up the shirt slowly, the white bandage on his chest vanishing under the colorful stripes of the watches. He can feel himself taking deep breaths, like he can catch Richie’s scent. When he’s dressed and has his jacket back on he leans down to pick up his papers and his folded shirt.

“All right?” Richie asks.

“Fine,” Eddie says, too quickly. He presses the button to call for the nurse. The shirt’s too big--he’s not swimming in it, he’s not that small compared to Richie, but there’s absolutely no danger of it catching on any of his bandages. His outer jacket covers most of the bright pattern, making it feel almost like a secret against his skin. Eddie cannot get used to this. He cannot use his injury as a reason to wear Richie’s clothes.

It would be kind of nice though. There’s a ghost of warmth in here, caught in the fabric.

Tracy comes back in, and Eddie understands why she didn’t wait with him. She’s pushing a wheelchair when she comes through the door. The second he sees it something in Eddie’s chest sinks down into his stomach.

“Oh god,” he says. “Can I sign a waiver? I really don’t want that.” The risk analyst part of Eddie understands about liabilities, but the part of him that was a boy whose mother wouldn’t let him participate in PE is balking.

“I’m sorry,” Tracy says. In the same way that Dr. Fox knew he was going to be resistant over the painkillers, she knows him pretty well by now too. “It’s policy.”

And Eddie understands that, but he’s trying to institute some kind of new policies himself. Get some kind of control. But the hospital can’t sue Eddie if his belated attempts to grow up result in _another_ catastrophic injury. Spinal damage.

“Should get Bill in here to drive you,” Richie says lightly, watching Eddie melt down like it’s nothing new—and it’s nothing new, because Richie is used to him freaking out like this, and Eddie doesn’t want to be freaking out, but the freaking out is partially triggered by how much he doesn’t want to freak out. “Go really fast downhill, and tilt you like—” And then he leans forward at a forty-five-degree angle, which seems more than someone as large as Richie should be able to do without falling over.

Both Eddie and Tracy stare at him.

“Are you a smooth criminal?” Eddie manages, because he recognizes that lean.

“How long can you hold that?” Tracy asks.

Richie responds by trying to do the Michael Jackson “hoo!” and Tracy looks so alarmed that Eddie starts frantically apologizing on Richie’s behalf, because Richie doesn’t look apologetic at all. That’s how they get Eddie into the freight elevator and down into the lobby—with Eddie picking at Richie for his inability to use an inside voice after _thirty fucking years_. Not because it actually annoys him, but because he needs to focus on something other than the steady ticking of the floor numbers passing by, and Richie’s there, taking up space behind Eddie. Being pushed in the hospital chair makes Eddie feel like at any moment Richie will suddenly lay hands on his shoulders to startle him, but it never comes, and the anticipation is almost worse.

An orderly asks Richie if he wants to bring the car around. If so, he’ll wait with the patient in front of the door.

“Nah, I got him,” Richie says calmly.

“Yeah, he’s got me, we’re fine,” Eddie agrees without even thinking about it.

The orderly looks dubious.

“I’ll bring the chair back,” Richie says, like that’s the concern. “Is this like the grocery store? We’re over in that lot right there, it’s no problem.”

Apparently the orderly has had enough of Richie singing, _“Annie, are you okay?”_ under his breath on the way down, because he agrees to let Eddie go without further supervision. About ten yards away from the sidewalk, out on the concrete, Richie suddenly leans down and mutters in Eddie’s ear, “Our brave heroes escape the torture facility!”

It’s cold out. Early fall in Maine. Nothing new, but Eddie feels almost numb by now, especially his ears. Richie’s proximity makes his skin prickle.

Richie makes like he’s about to speedup and Eddie grabs the seat of the chair. _“Don’t you fucking dare, Richie.”_ But he wouldn’t mind if he did, actually. Now that Richie mentioned the grocery store Eddie’s thinking about shopping carts instead of wheelchairs, imagining them small again, Richie pushing him along in the basket and putting his feet up and gliding. It never happened—Eddie’s mother would never allow that, and Richie never had money or inclination to take Eddie grocery shopping when they were kids—but Eddie can imagine it. Them sailing under some dark sky, going _fast_ and out of control but going _together_.

_“Do not fucking touch me,”_ Richie parrots back in a strained high-pitched voice. It takes Eddie a second to recognize it as his own from 1989, after he broke his arm.

“Is that what I said?”

“That’s what you said, it was the best thing I’ve ever heard in my life—”

“Well _you_ thought you knew how to reset an arm, you were _thirteen_ and you were just like ‘I’m gonna set it’ as if you knew what the fuck that meant—”

“And yet I still notice that you still have full use of the arm, thanks to my medical intervention,” Richie says loftily.

Eddie’s looking kind of absently for Richie’s douchemobile rental car, but he doesn’t see it. He keeps searching, absently saying, “My doctor told me that it looked like a real amateur did it.”

“No, she didn’t.”

“Did so.”

He remains kind of nonplussed even as Richie steers the chair up beside a tall rust-red truck. It’s only when Richie releases the handles of the chair that Eddie realizes this is their ride.

“Oh,” he says, looking up at it.

Richie unlocks the truck with a clinking of keys and says, “Okay, so Mike’s six-four, which is cruel and unusual for like a lot of reasons, but you’re gonna have to climb up. I mean—gaping chest wound or no gaping chest wound, this is gonna suck.”

Eddie looks up at the roof of the truck, the height of the seat—cloth interior—and then up at Richie. For some reason he hadn’t consciously processed that Mike is taller than Richie, but as he rifles back through his memories of them standing side by side, he knows it again. Richie seems to take up the whole world.

“You all there, Spaghetti Monster?” Richie asks.

Eddie grimaces. “Fuck you,” he replies. “I’m getting up. Hold the chair.” It would be just his luck for him to knock the chair away in the middle of trying to stand, lose his balance, and fracture his tailbone in the hospital parking lot.

Richie clamps a hand on one of the handles. “Okay. If you need a boost—”

Eddie stands up slowly, puts one hand on the bench seat in the cab of the truck, and plants the other in the middle of Richie’s face.

“Oh, the glasses, man,” Richie complains, but he doesn’t try to move. His nose is squashed against the heel of Eddie’s palm.

Eddie relocates that hand to Richie’s shoulder and steps up to the cab. There’s a small step for just this purpose on the passenger side, and he doesn’t feel _great_ about the amount of effort it takes for him to hoist his body up into the truck, but it could be worse. He doesn’t black out or get dizzy or start coughing up blood, so he’s gonna chalk it up as a win. When he glances at Richie, Richie’s arms are up like Eddie’s about to fall and he’s gonna catch him.

“What are you doing?” Eddie asks, incredulous.

“I have no idea,” Richie says.

With that extended hand he grabs the buckle of the seatbelt and hands it to Eddie. Good thing, too—if he’d tried to buckle Eddie into the seat, Eddie would have had to physically fight him or something. He’s not a child. Eddie buckles himself in and finds Richie watching him with a familiar anxiety.

Package secured?” Richie asks. Eddie has a moment of flat incomprehension where he assumes Richie is talking about his dick, and then Richie appears to speak into his own wrist, putting on an official and top-secret kind of voice. “Package secured. Return to the rendezvous point.”

“Oh man,” Eddie says slowly, remembering. “We used to play that game.”

“We did,” Richie agrees.

Richie would always start it, because Richie usually started things. Mike usually caught on pretty fast—he had played before anyone introduced him to it, probably at his church group or something—and he would grin and raise a hand to his ear, and then Eddie, who was always looking at Richie, would catch on and put a hand up, and then Bev, and then Ben, and it was almost always either Bill or Stan who was the last to catch on before Richie screamed _“Protect the president!”_ and they all pounced on him. Ben had never played the game before them, and was completely baffled on the way back from a day in the Barrens when suddenly his new friends just leapt on him shrieking, but afterwards he said _You guys are so cool_. Eddie showed him how to flip his bike upside-down and turn the pedal and make ice cream, which was a game Stan would go along with but Richie always ruined by ordering _one dead fetus, please_ or something like that, and—

“Don’t you dare jump on me,” Eddie says.

Richie grins and widens his eyes at him threateningly, and then says, “Okay, I’m dropping this back off. Crack the window if it gets too hot in here, and remember, bystanders are allowed to break in if they see a dog in a hot car—”

“Get the fuck out of here,” Eddie tells him.

Richie closes the passenger door on him and goes, leaving Eddie in the artificial quiet of the cab.

It smells sweet in here. Like sugar and time, and something green—maybe cut wood. And then Richie, of course. Where did Richie’s flashy rental car go? It would be like him do declare he was busting Eddie out of the hospital in style, as if Eddie was ever in the mood to appreciate a convertible. He likes cars, sure, but he doesn’t like bugs in his teeth.

It’s September. What the hell was Richie doing with a convertible in September in _Derry_ of all places? Who’s going to see him in that car?

_Me_ , Eddie tells himself, looking a the tape deck in the cab console. He opens the deck to see if there’s a cassette in there, but it’s empty. He closes it again and then opens the glove compartment. There are some old tapes in there—the clear plastic ones with the dark tape winding through them, but none of them are labeled. Gotta be Mike’s, right? He sets them carefully back in their boxes and closes the glove compartment. He leans back gingerly.

The seatbelt goes straight across his chest. If it locks, or if they’re in an accident where it actually tries to hold Eddie in the seat, it’s gonna hurt like a motherfucker.

He fucks with it a little bit, pulling out the belt far with his arm until it locks, and then unbuckling it. He remembers too late that he can’t reach up to reset the belt, but he unbuckles the belt and carefully guides it clear of his body, and then watches it slide back up into the ceiling. Some kind of snake slinking into a tree and out of sight.

When Richie comes back, will he notice that Eddie’s unbuckled? Does he look at Eddie half as much as Eddie looks at him? Or is it all just in anxiety—Eddie’s fragile, Eddie’s a glass statute, Eddie’s about to shatter into a million pieces?

The idea of driving off—just going anywhere and throwing caution and law to the wind—makes Eddie feel like a wind is blowing through his body, scattering leaves and hair and bandages and papers in its wake. In the sense that all roads lead to Rome, once the car gets moving they can go actually anywhere. The limiting factor here is time.

And Eddie’s body.

He drums his fingers on his knees. They’re a little slower to respond than he might like—is it just paranoia? Is it nerve damage? Are they just stiff? He doesn’t know and part of him’s afraid to investigate it.

_What do I want?_

And then, a faint mocking voice: _What are you looking for, Eddie?_

And, _If you lived here, you’d be home by now._

He shakes his head. He doesn’t feel much of anything when he does it; the painkillers are definitely working in his system. He’s going to have to stop by a pharmacy or something and he doesn’t know when, but he suspects it’s going to have to be soon—and he doesn’t have his insurance card or his ID. God, this is going to be a nightmare.

He tilts his head all the way back on the seat and closes his eyes and breathes in. Sugar and grass and varnish and motor oil and _Richie_. What does he want? And then he remembers, glances out the window to make sure Richie’s nowhere in sight and guiltily tucks his chin down until he can press his nose inside the collar of the shirt.

Somewhere in the last thirty years Richie started smelling good. It’s completely at odds with how unkempt he looks—he chooses to look, anyway—and the memory of the reeking teenage boy he used to be. The shirt carries the smell of new leather, of detergent, of soap and something dark and animal he’s convinced wicked off Richie’s skin. He breathes, glancing guiltily out the window, until he can’t smell anything other than clean fabric, and then he lifts his head.

He wants Richie to get in the truck, to lean across the bench seat, to kiss him. He wants to put his hands in Richie’s hair, to sink his fingers into the shoulders of his leather jacket—not warm enough for a Maine winter, no matter how many button-down shirts he piles on underneath it—to grab hold of his belt loops and feel up his back. He wants to hold Richie’s jaw when he does it, to feel the push and press of his mouth.

The idea starts an ache under his tongue that he doesn’t think he’s felt before. The need to be kissed as something his body wants, not just something it feels like the correct moment to do, like it’s the last thing on the checklist of what to do on a date. But he’s also faintly nauseated from the painkillers and the hospital breakfast. He doesn’t know what he wants, but he suspects fruit would be a good place to start. How has Richie been living, if he’s coming to the hospital every day and staying as long as visiting hours will allow him? What’s he eating?

And what the fuck did the rest of the Losers do about Bowers? Ben said _It’s taken care of_ with such an air of finality that Eddie was ready to believe him because of how he said it, not just because it was the easiest thing not to worry about it in the hospital. Just to let it be taken care of. He doesn’t want them to take care of him, but if he has no choice but to let them take care of the rest of the world around them… well, he has no choice.

He raises one hand to touch the puncture wound on his face, gingerly. It’s healing now. He keeps probing at the inside of his cheek with his tongue, just gently. The doctor told him that the sutures will dissolve on the inside on their own. It ought to surprise him how fast it’s healing. A dental hygienist once told Eddie that the mouth is the second-fastest healing part of the body, and Eddie made the mistake of asking which was the first. “The eye,” she replied cheerily. Wentworth Tozier was probably the first dentist Eddie ever went to, and he used to get in with his reflective mirror and ask Eddie knowingly if he was sneaking cigarettes like Richie, and Eddie was horrified because the answer really was no.

Mouth and eyes. That’s Richie, all the way. What does it mean if those parts heal fast? Does Richie regenerate? Is that why as soon as Richie banged on the gong in the Jade of the Orient, Eddie felt that old quiver in his chest pick back up after thirty goddamn years—Richie’s just someone who can’t be kept down?

At that point Richie opens the driver’s side door and swings himself up. “Okay, Eduardo.” He slams the door. “Let’s blow this popsicle stand.”

Eddie moves his hand from the wound in his cheek and presses it over his mouth. Guilty, almost. He doesn’t know why, but he doesn’t want Richie to see him probing his injuries. He stares at the closed glove compartment.

Richie stops moving in his peripheral vision. He holds still and quiet for a moment and then asks, “What?”

Eddie braces one hand on his ribs to take a deep breath. Then he asks, “What did you do with the body?”

The silence holds for a moment, and then Richie reaches out and hits the button to lock the car doors. The locks click into place with a metallic _chunk!_ Eddie lifts his head. Richie’s hands are resting on the steering wheel, knuckles loose.

“I don’t know,” Richie says.

Eddie stares at him, imagining he can hear a clock ticking. “You don’t know,” he repeats.

Richie doesn’t look at him, just stares at the logo in the center of the wheel. “Bill and Ben took care of it,” he says. The same words. _Took care of it. It’s taken care of._

_I don’t want to be taken care of._

“After they got tested to see if their blood types matched. They didn’t. Stan and Mike got cleaned up. They said you crashed. Ben held me down in a chair and someone stuck a needle in me. Then Bill and Ben vanished for a couple hours. I don’t know what happened. I didn’t ask. Maybe they went off to fuck in a supply closet and left me to hang.” Richie shrugs, but there’s no humor on his face even as he makes the joke. “Ben says it’s taken care of. That’s all I know.”

Eddie stares at him. All he can think of is that Bowers went after Mike in Mike’s place of work, and that Mike was suspended and then basically lost his job over this. People in Derry, Mike says, are starting to experience consequences. So what happens if someone finds Bowers’s body?

“You can ask Ben about it when we get back to the hotel,” Richie says.

“You haven’t asked?”

At that Richie turns his head to look at him, his eyes wide and his mouth stretched in a rictus sort of grin. “I don’t ask questions I don’t want to know the answer to,” Richie says. Then he turns back and reaches for his seatbelt.

“Uh,” Eddie says. Richie looks up, eyebrows all polite inquiry. Eddie swallows. “Can you—” He points up at the buckle where his seatbelt is retracted into the car roof.

Richie’s brow furrows, creases forming between his slashing brows and faint lines on his forehead, but he stretches out and leans across the cab without question. “Yeah, sure.” His body crosses Eddie’s for just a moment. His arm forms a barrier to Eddie’s torso, and that’s a good thing. If they were in Europe, in a car that drove on the right side, Richie’s chest would press right up against Eddie’s shoulder, and Eddie doesn’t know what he’d do then. If he’d have to put his face against Richie’s throat and breathe deep, get a hit of his scent straight from the source where his skin is warm.

What is he supposed to _do_ with all this want? It’s more than his body should be able to hold. Do people walk around like this every day? How does anyone get anything done?

Richie hands him the buckle and returns to his side of the cab. “You thinking about making a break for it?” he asks as he pulls his own seatbelt into place.

“Hmm?” Eddie asks, trying to focus on the Richie in front of him instead of the one in his mind’s eye.

Richie lifts his eyebrows and inclines his head toward the seatbelt.

“Oh,” he says. “I was just testing the give, so it doesn’t…” He slides his thumb under the belt and pulls it gently away from his clavicle, demonstrating the space between the strap and his sternum.

It’s clear Richie gets the point, because he winces suddenly. “Jeez, if that’s not pressure to drive safe…” He turns the key in the ignition and Eddie almost jumps as the engine rumbles to life under them.

“You should drive safely all the time!” Eddie insists.

Richie puts both hands on the wheel and just grins at him, then lifts his chin to check his mirrors. Then he reaches out and puts a hand on the back of Eddie’s seat to twist around and look behind him. “I’m a paragon of responsibility, Eds,” he says absently, as he puts the truck in reverse and slowly backs out of the parking space.

Eddie might have resolved that there’s no reason to push back when Richie does that, but the nickname combined with the reach is too much. “Don’t call me Eds,” he mutters, feeling himself blush. But Richie, mercifully, has his eyes on the road.

Eddie gets to have bad posture now. He sits carefully so that his shoulders are pressed to the seat, instead of his spine.

“Why do you have Mike’s truck?” Eddie asks.

Richie shrugs. “It was between that and Patty’s sedan. And I figured it would be better if it was something that… you know.”

Eddie, who has no love of convertible tops on cars, immediately feels himself bristle at the idea that Richie’s trying to protect him and keep him out of the wind.

“Belonged to us,” Richie finishes, which is not what Eddie thought he was going to say at all. “Not that Patty isn’t great, she’s hysterical, but. You know.”

He does. She’s not one of the Lucky Seven. The Losers Club that walked out of hell. Twice. He looks down at his own knees, looking at how sharp and thin they look under his pants, and waits.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Update:
> 
> [oh no he's cute](https://twitter.com/cytakigawa/status/1254086241194295296) (Eddie buttoning up Richie's shirt) by [@cytakigawa](https://twitter.com/cytakigawa)


	6. Take My Hand

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Richie risks life and limb, bleeds, and is defeated in an impression contest. Ben answers some awkward questions; Patty has hidden depths. Eddie takes a nap, is Too Hot (hot damn), and has a sing-along.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I got vagued on Twitter so here's Chapter 6. Thanks to qianwanshi for beta-reading my many drafts of this one.
> 
> Also: in this fic, Mike has his book upbringing, instead of the film one! This means that Will Hanlon escaped the Black Spot fire during his military service and saw It there, and Mike was raised by his parents until Will died of cancer when Mike was a teenager. Just letting you know so that the film-only fans don't come in and go "wait, how could Eddie possibly have met Mike's dad, and who is this guy?"
> 
> Content warnings: canonical violence, canonical manslaughter, noncanonical disposal of a murdered body. Eddie throws things. Eddie's discomfort with his body leans into ableist vibes at times--this is his perspective and not meant to be objective, btw. Mentions of the Oscars. References to a number of animated movies. Patty is disconcertingly down with conspiracy to conceal a murder. Memories of Sonia Kaspbrak. Stan and Patty are playfully possessive of each other. Fertility issues. Richie is too excited to tell his vasectomy story again. Breaking a kosher diet. One church choir and the memories thereof. Child-Eddie is distrusting of parents as a result of his abuse.

It’s not that Eddie isn’t totally aware of his situation, because he is. He smells like he hasn’t showered in a couple of weeks, because he hasn’t. There’s still dry shampoo, probably, caked down near his scalp, because when you have a powder like that how are you supposed to brush it all out? He’s been brushing his teeth gingerly using a cup of water and the generic toothbrush and tiny tube of toothpaste available for him at the hospital, and he’s sure he’s missing big spots because he’s avoiding the stitches in the side of his cheek, and he needs to see a dentist to see if Bowers damaged his tooth when he stabbed him. There’s a hole in his chest that, while no longer technically _gaping_ , still stinks of old blood.

And Eddie has problems to deal with, now that he’s out of the hospital. Namely, what the fuck did Bill and Ben do with Henry Bowers’s dead body, after Richie killed him? How are Eddie and (apparently) Richie getting to Ben’s house in New York when Eddie’s car is still in New York City in the shop getting the dents popped out of the door and Richie has abandoned his douchemobile rental car? Is Eddie even going to have the energy to actually initiate divorce proceedings now that he’s announced to Myra he wants them? He doesn’t have a cell phone. He needs to call work and explain what the fuck happened to him.

And Richie’s being _careful_ with him.

Maybe Eddie was too vehement with the _don’t help me, don’t try to take care of me_ speech, because Richie keeps up a running string of commentary as they creep at a snail’s pace from the parking lot to the hotel lobby, but he doesn’t try to touch Eddie. This shouldn’t bother Eddie; he’s not really used to being touched, to the point that when someone actually embraces him he realizes all at once how the space around him aches a little just all the time. And he’s never really liked casual touch—his mother wiping his hair out of his eyes or cleaning dirt off his face, or Myra straightening his collar, or all the little casual touches that people use to assert affection. They always seemed performative, in some way—Myra loved them, asked for them specifically, but it never felt natural for Eddie to reach out and maintain her the way she did for him.

Richie, though, was always casually tactile when they were kids. Eddie was apprehensive about it when he met Richie—they were seven and Richie was always reaching out and putting a hand on Eddie’s shoulder—but Richie was just always like that, and with Bill and Stan too, and then he met Richie’s parents and saw how they casually held hands when they came to school events, how they sat shoulder to shoulder and tilted their heads to murmur to each other in the audience of the class play, and he figured this must be something that normal people did, something that his mother would do if his dad hadn’t died, and then Eddie would be used to touch instead of being scared of it. And Richie never had a problem with pushing Eddie on the swings, grabbing him by the ankles and yelling _“Underdoggy!”_ as he sprinted under the parabola of Eddie’s feet on the playground, and that was convenient; and no matter how often Eddie lectured him on grass allergies he never seemed to think twice about wrestling Eddie to the ground like he did Bill and Stan and. It was kind of nice. That Richie didn’t change his approach at all. Sometimes he remembered when Eddie complained and apologized, but that happened less in later years as Eddie’s complaints and lectures got more and more frequent and Richie learned more swear words.

He was like that as soon as they showed up in Derry, too—grabbing Eddie’s wrist and taking things out of his hands and game for arm wrestling and standing at a slight stoop to stay at Eddie’s eye level even though he looked ridiculous. And Eddie knows Richie helped stop the bleeding, Richie did chest compressions _correctly_ despite the consequences, Richie was able to physically lift him and carry him out of the pipes and into the Barrens. Eddie’s not saying he wants that right now.

But it is taking him far too long to pick his way across the parking lot on his own two feet. He’s got _Call! Don’t Fall!_ stuck in his head, and while Richie’s clearly within arm’s reach, his hands are jammed deep in his pockets again and he’s making fun of Eddie like it’s his job.

It’s kind of a relief, actually, that he’s talking about it instead of politely ignoring it. When they were kids, Bill’s stutter embarrassed adults to the point it seemed they couldn’t stand it. Richie was always in there calling Bill Mushmouth, asking if he handed out towels with his showers—but he always let Bill finish his entire sentence, no matter how long it took Bill to get there. And considering how desperate Richie was one-hundred-percent of the time to get the last word, that meant something.

“It’s just ’cause of your short little legs,” Richie assures him. “Don’t worry about it; I knew when I offered to come pick you up it would take us two full days to actually get inside and that’s a risk I’m willing to take—”

“ _Fuck_ you,” Eddie says.

He’s not quite panting but his breath hurts the back of his throat like it’s something sharp and solid there. And it’s cold—still morning, the sun hasn’t burned off some of that early mist—in a way that reminds him of the hospital, but it’s a humid kind of cold, so he feels clammy and sweaty at the same time, and he’s been reliably informed that sweat is the enemy of wound care. His jacket is warm enough for now, but just barely; his hands are freezing. If Eddie stops now to take Mike’s mittens out of his pocket, Richie’s going to mock him within an inch of his life. His fingers ache with cold.

“I’m average height. In most parts of the world.”

“Oh, most parts of the world,” Richie says. “I’m pretty sure that doesn’t include this parking lot, considering it’s you and it’s me, and by definition, that means you are _below average_.”

Richie’s strides aren’t even noticeably bigger than his, though maybe he’s adjusting to match Eddie. He’s absolutely playing up how tall he is, though, hands in his pockets but his shoulders back and stretched so he can look down his nose at him.

The fact that Eddie likes it makes his insides squirm. It keeps him from reaching out and leaning on Richie like he’s tempted to do. Instead he puts his hand on a stranger’s car to catch his breath, and Richie stands there and shifts like he doesn’t know what to do with his arms and keeps chattering about mathematical concepts that are activating Eddie’s deep memory from like the fourth grade and seem to have no purpose.

“—so while I wouldn’t say you’re the average height in this situation, I’m very impressed by how you’re able to be the _mean_ despite your stature,” Richie finishes, his tone trending towards something like _pompous British professor_ without actually committing to the voice.

Eddie, aware he’s being incredibly rude by leaning on the trunk of this rando’s Pathfinder, looks up at him incredulously. “Are you telling me—” Inhale. “—that you can give me shit for forty-five minutes straight—” Bigger inhale. “—but that _I_ have somehow hurt your feelings?”

“Oh, don’t be silly, I don’t have feelings,” Richie says so seriously and loftily that Eddie almost forgets to be horrified by the words themselves. “I’m just impressed by your badness level. It’s unusually high for someone your size.”

Eddie squints at him and asks, “ _Lilo & Stitch_?”

Richie shrugs, unrepentant. “Hey, you recognized it. I’m a Loser—” Eddie can hear the capitalization. “—who goes to see kids’ movies by himself, but you don’t have kids either.”

Eddie blinks at him. “You just like the alien voice, don’t you?”

Richie grins and says, _“Okay, okay, okay,”_ in the thick back-of-the-throat voice of Experiment 626. In his own voice, he says, “Bet you cried buckets during _Lilo & Stitch_, didn’t you? You look like the type.”

Eddie has a lot of complicated feelings about his “badness level” and his looking like any kind of type. He fires back, “You look like you can pick your nose with your own tongue.”

“Ha!” Richie barks. “Eds gets off a good one! Get your chucks right here, folks, hot fresh chucks—”

“Shut the fuck up,” Eddie hisses at him.

He did cry buckets during _Lilo & Stitch_. That was during the phase in his life where he liked to watch all of the Academy Award nominees so he could have opinions on them if anyone ever asked him about them, which no one ever did. He sat through _Ice Age_ and the deeply disturbing Japanese movie about the bathhouse that year, and the opening to _Treasure Planet_ made him tear up though he wasn’t sure why—something about the music—but the little animated child said _“If you take him away, you’re stealing”_ and Eddie fucking lost it and had no idea why until right about now.

He watched all the Academy Award nominees until 2005 when he had to sit through both _Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit_ and _Corpse Bride_ in the same year and then he gave up on the Oscars as a whole, and only saw the movies if Myra expressed interest.

Eddie needs another rest when they actually get into the hotel lobby. There are lots of spindly little tables with cushy armchairs in there, and Richie proves that at some point he learned an inside voice, because he delivers his seemingly endless stream of chatter in such a normal and polite murmur that if Eddie reacts to any of the batshit things he’s saying _he’ll_ be the one who looks crazy. And he’s definitely doing it on purpose, smirk widening every time Eddie breaks and asks, “What the hell are you _talking_ about?” like that’s the game in the first place and he just never mentioned the rules to Eddie.

Eddie has a little bit of a fantasy in the freight elevator, though. On the way to the freight elevator, anyway. Reaching out with his useless arm and Richie ducking to hook it under the back of his neck, and then maybe Richie slinging his free arm around Eddie’s back and taking hold of him at the hip. Three-legged race all over again. He wants it, and the ferocity with which he wants it is dangerous and startling, so he doesn’t touch either. Just lets Richie stick a hand in the elevator door to stop it from closing while Eddie shuffles over to the control panel.

“What floor?” Eddie asks, resigned.

“Three,” Richie says, and then, “Wait, do you want to go to Ben’s first or do you want anything out of your bags?”

Eddie stands there with his index finger hovering over the elevator buttons, flatly uncomprehending.

“Because the Losers are there,” Richie says obviously. His fingers are still wrapped around the edge of the elevator door. The machine makes an urgent sound, tries to close the door, and relents as soon as it detects Richie standing there blocking it. “For, like, your victory lap, or whatever. I should probably text them and tell them to move the finishing line like real close so we’re not there for the whole month of September.”

“Richie,” Eddie says, meaning _get the hell to the point_.

“But your bags are on the fourth floor,” Richie says. “If you wanted to, like, I don’t know.”

He doesn’t know either, so he considers it. What he’d really like is to take a shower, but his doctors banned that. He’d like his phone so that he can really set a countdown timer for forty-eight hours until he can clean himself up, but his phone is currently in the lair of a hopefully-deceased pedophagic hell-clown. He needs a new phone, but he’s reasonably sure he can’t get one of those in this hotel, so it’s a moot point.

“I want to brush my teeth,” he says. Weirdly, he missed his toothpaste. Logically he knows it’s very unlikely for there to be sugar in toothpaste, but the little tubes of travel toothpaste the hospital provided for his careful and delicate usage were bright blue with sparkles in them, and Eddie’s a grown-ass man who doesn’t need sparkles in his toothpaste. Not that there’s anything wrong with men who do need sparkles in their toothpaste, he reminds himself immediately. If the best part of brushing your teeth is sparkly toothpaste, who is he to take that away from anyone? But Eddie’s been using Sensodyne for as long as he’s been able to buy it at the grocery store because it makes him feel better about his ability to eat cold or sweet things—not that he ate a lot of those, because he’s a grown-ass man who—

Wait a minute. Eddie just got out of the hospital. He can eat ice cream.

Richie is still standing, still ignoring the complaints of the elevator as he holds the door open. When Eddie turns his face up to him—and Eddie’s not sure what his face is doing—Richie immediately gets a suspicious sort of look on his face. “What?”

“Tell me someone grabbed my toothpaste from the Townhouse,” he says.

Richie rolls his eyes. “ _Yes_ , we got your toothpaste, we got your toothbrush. You didn’t even unpack that room. If I didn’t know you I’d be like ‘Did Eddie brush his teeth at all the whole time we were in Derry?’”

“Did you brush your teeth the whole time we were in Derry?”

“It’s hit or miss,” Richie replies blandly. “I mean, I forgot a lot about being a kid and a teenager, but turns out disappointing my father is just like a constant. Like a core part of my personality, you know?”

Eddie curls his lip in revulsion and Richie grins. His teeth look basically the same. White enough—not the blue-white of people who pay to whiten them, but like Richie has mostly taken care of his teeth as an adult, which is more than teenage Eddie would have expected out of him. He still has that fucking overbite, which always seemed like a cruel irony when he was growing up the son of the local dentist, but now just looks familiar and… weirdly comforting. Eddie feels like he shouldn’t be allowed to take comfort in someone else’s teeth, but a lot of weird things have happened on the inside of his head lately and he’s well past self-policing.

“So your toothbrush is on the fourth floor,” Richie says, and Eddie realizes that he’s basically looking a Richie Tozier in the mouth and quickly averts his eyes back to the button panel. “If you’d rather see that before all of our friends who are so glad you’re alive and recovered—” He says it breezily but Eddie feels his hackles go up.

“Don’t,” he says.

Richie’s brow furrows in something like confusion and he waits.

“I know you’re kidding,” Eddie says. “But don’t.”

Richie blinks at him and then his eyes flick up and away, unfocused. Eddie can practically see him rewinding the tapes in his mind, looking for the error. He used to do that a lot when he was talking shit back in school, trying to figure out what he said that crossed the line that made them all shout _beep beep_ or that finally got the teacher to kick him out into the hall. Eddie remembers the _oh shit_ moment of realization and kind of waits for the ghost of it to reappear on Richie’s new, square, adult face.

The elevator beeps for the third time and then starts to close the door without regard for the human being blocking it. Richie and Eddie snap back to reality at the same time and Richie says, “Oh shit,” and steps out of the way and into the elevator itself before it can crush him.

“That’s a safety hazard,” Eddie says.

“Yeah, you think?”

But Richie does not get crushed to death in an elevator door, and Eddie pushes the button for the fourth floor so that he can go brush his teeth and set his paperwork down and try to look a little bit less deranged by the time he sees his friends.

For some reason it does not occur to him until Richie unlocks the door and holds it open for him that, if Richie was able to bring Eddie his clothes from his suitcases, it means that all of Eddie’s stuff is in Richie’s hotel room. He comprehends it with sharp and completely unwarranted surprise as soon as he sees his three bags, all lined up with military precision, next to the couch.

Richie has a suite. This should not surprise Eddie, but it kind of does. There are a couch and two armchairs and a coffee table and a television, and a kitchenette with two rickety chairs and a microwave and a minifridge, and then two doors. The one directly out of the kitchenette leads to a tiny room with a toilet and a bathtub. Eddie can see straight through the other door to a queen-sized bed with rumpled sheets.

This is where Richie has been living when he’s not squeezing all the time possible out of Sovereign Light Hospital’s visiting hours, or trading vigils with the other Losers to allow Eddie to see the rest of his friends. And that’s where Richie’s been sleeping.

“Bill went digging through your stuff,” Richie says. “I asked him what the fuck he was doing and he told me to fuck off, that you asked him to get something, but if anything’s missing that shouldn’t be, you can blame him.”

“I did tell him,” Eddie says, and realizes he’s standing uselessly in the hotel room doorway. He takes a small step to the left to let Richie into his own suite. He puts his discharge papers on the countertop—this is a nice hotel, but it’s clearly fake marble or granite or whatever—next to the sink and concludes it’s probably best to sit down for a minute. Carefully he picks his way over to the table and its spindly little chairs.

Richie’s still looking at him as though for an explanation, but there’s a deliberate casualness to his face, like he’s ready for Eddie to tell him to fuck off too.

“It’s fine,” Eddie says. He’s about to open his toiletry bag and see it completely bereft of pills, if Bill followed his instructions. And he’s also going to get the sinking panicky feeling of when he doesn’t have all his stuff, when anything could happen and he’s not prepared for it; but he’s having that every time he remembers he lost his phone anyway, so maybe it’ll be manageable. “Can you do me a favor?”

Richie makes prayer hands over his chest and wobbles his head back and forth in wordless reference to _I Dream of Jeannie_.

“Can you bring my toiletry bag over here?” Last time lifting it was a strain; Eddie’s not even gonna attempt it in his current state.

“Yeah.” Richie effortlessly hooks it by the handle, crosses the room, and swings it up onto the table in front of Eddie. “Do you want your own shirt, too, while we’re going through your luggage?”

Eddie blinks at him, confused.

Richie shrugs. “I swear I’ve done laundry since we were here—Stan took us all to this laundromat—but if you have a shirt you can get your arms into I won’t be offended.”

Eddie remembers he’s wearing Richie’s shirt and almost blushes. “I don’t have any button-downs,” he says. He just tipped the next week’s worth of work clothes into his suitcase when he started packing. He was prepared for any number of business meetings, but not, apparently, for fighting a killer clown or getting out of the hospital. He remembers rolling up his pants to pick across the Kenduskeag down in the Barrens.

Also, he kind of doesn’t want to give up this shirt. Not just because he doesn’t want to go through the ordeal of changing in front of Richie again.

Richie gives him a grin that’s only half-leer, so that could be worse. “Well, my floordrobe is open to you,” he says. Eddie grimaces again and turns to start unzipping his toiletry bag. “Can I get you anything else? Sparkling water? Hot towel? Complimentary chocolate mints?”

Eddie has never eaten chocolate mints in a hotel. They buy them in bulk, and you never know how long it’s been since the hotel got their shipment in. And Eddie has read conflicting reports of whether dark chocolate or extra-dark chocolate is actually good for your heart, the same way the medical community is always waffling about red wine and tannins and everything, so he’s tried to steer clear of chocolate for a long time.

Eddie would actually like some chocolate now. Chocolate pudding cups were one of the things provided to him in hospital, as a dessert or as a snack or whenever Sarah seemed to think he was having a hard time. The chocolate helped ease the pity.

He looks around at the fancy hotel room. “Do they actually do chocolate mints?”

“They do,” Richie says on a laugh, “but I ate that shit like as soon as I got here. If you want them I’ll take the Do Not Disturb off the door and we can see if it’s a check-in benefit or if I have to go down to the front desk and beg for my friend just out of the hospital or what.”

“Aren’t we leaving tomorrow?” Eddie asks.

Richie’s eyebrows climb in a way that Eddie notes with something like foreboding. “If you want,” he says.

Eddie doesn’t look away from him, letting his hand rest frozen on the toiletry bag. He’s trying to pin Richie with his eyes.

“Why wouldn’t we leave tomorrow?”

Richie shrugs. “Gotta get a rental car that can carry all your baggage,” he says. “So like a tractor-trailer. See if you feel like being in the car for ten hours.”

Really that shouldn’t sound like exertion but Eddie’s well aware of the micro-adjustments that your abdominal muscles make to keep you upright when you’re traveling at sixty-plus miles per hour. He’s gonna be tired and he’s gonna sleep a lot and he’s gonna be sore, and he really thinks he’d just rather put some distance between himself and the state of Maine, if he has the choice. He’s going to have to come back in three weeks for his follow-up, but he’d like to use the time that’s his while he has it.

“I feel like being in the car for ten hours,” he reports back.

Richie snorts. “No one _really_ feels like being in the—” He interrupts himself and his eyebrows lift and his eyes widen. “Oh.”

Eddie was returning his attention to his toiletry bag and his impending dental hygiene, but at that he snaps his head back up to look at Richie, hands on the table. “What?”

“I forgot about your car thing,” Richie says. His expression is completely serious.

Eddie blinks twice, trying to figure out what _his car thing_ could be. His Escalade, back in New York and still having the damage popped out of the body? The fact that while he’s on heavy painkillers—a thought which makes him feel weirdly nauseated despite the fact that none of the pills are in his possession yet—he won’t be able to drive? If anything, that last gives Eddie the most pause. It feels weird to demand Richie drive him ten hours away to New York to wherever Ben lives. Weirder than it feels to demand that Richie hand over his coffee or pick up some candy from the local big box store. Eddie’s going to have to go back in three weeks, and does he think that Richie’s going to drive him a collective twenty hours across New England, just because Eddie’s working through some stuff? The inconvenience feels bigger than should be allowed.

“My what?” he asks, nonplussed. He’s swallowing, trying to work out how he can make this fair—Ben offered the place, and if he and Bev and Richie have two cars and a rotation and Eddie is stoned in the backseat or the passenger seat it’ll be more of a group trip, less of a personal imposition, but that feels just as greedy to ask too.

“Your car thing,” Richie says. “Your raging hard-on for the automobile.”

Eddie blinks at him, then without looking wrenches the zipper of his toiletry bag open, fumbles inside with his useless right hand, and throws the first thing he touches at Richie. It turns out to be his little travel bottle of face wash.

Richie laughs, puts his hands up to cover his face, ducks. “Yeah, planes, trains, and automobiles. Your fucking fetish for the Industrial Revolution—hey!”

The moisturizer hits Richie in the eyeglasses, right on top of the frames. Eddie has a panicky moment where he thinks he’s going to break them, which would _suck_ for so many reasons. But then Richie’s just laughing, looking a little dazed the way Eddie used to feel in school when the screen for the projector would wobble—whole perception of the world shaken.

“I’m sorry!” he blurts out automatically, surprised at himself. He puts both hands over his mouth.

That just makes Richie laugh harder. “Fucking _why_? Are you sure you’ve got nerve damage, because that was a _beep beep motherfucker_ right there.” He tugs his glasses further down the bridge of his nose and—

“You’re bleeding,” Eddie says.

Richie frowns at him, incredulous. “No, I’m not.”

But basically right between Richie’s eyes there’s a little red line too bright and vivid to be anything but blood.

“Yeah, you are,” Eddie says, waving him forward. Richie stoops, brow still furrowed, and blood wells up and starts dripping. “Ah, shit.” Eddie flips the toiletry bag open and finds the pack of travel tissues—why the fuck didn’t he throw that at Richie?—and clumsily fumbles one out, presses it to the bridge of Richie’s nose.

“Uh?” Richie says, nonplussed.

“Shh.” Eddie hooks Richie’s glasses off his face and inspects the nose bridge on the frames. The outsides are black plastic—Richie wears the stupid Buddy Holly glasses, because of course he does—but on the inside there’s a clear plastic triangle to help keep them on his nose, and that’s much smaller and narrower than the blunt black frame, and when Eddie hit Richie in the face he managed to jam that back into Richie’s brow and it cut him. He dabs at it like he might a shaving injury. Head wounds bleed a lot. Richie has expressive eyebrows; the skin’s soft there.

“What the fuck?” Richie asks.

“I’m really sorry,” Eddie says, and means it.

“For fucking _what_?”

“Your glasses cut you.” He holds his thumb over the spot and watches Richie try to blink clear of the ends of the tissue where it touches his lashes. They’re very black, short and stubby. Richie’s looking at him—of course he’s looking at him, Eddie just wounded him with a skincare product. “Fuck, I didn’t mean to get you in the face.”

“I mean, I figured you didn’t mean to get me in the face, I’m just surprised you learned to throw somewhere in the last thirty years.”

Richie was unconscious in the deadlights when Eddie lanced It.

“Can you not?” Eddie demands, pulling the tissue away and finding a fresh new spot to blot on. “I’ve got Neosporin in here—should fucking clean it, your glasses are dirty.” If he’d hit Richie in the face with the bottle of hydrogen peroxide he would have really hurt him. What the fuck was he thinking?

“They’re not dirty, they’re new,” Richie replies.

Eddie blinks once and then looks down at the glasses, turning them this way and that as if he knows anything about the way glasses age. “Since when?” They look identical, not just to the glasses Richie showed up wearing at the Jade of the Orient, but also to the beer-bottle specs Richie wore when he was a kid and broke over and over again.

“Since I broke the old ones.” He gestures at the space over his eye, miming a lens. “Just shattered it. Fucking annoying, full of blood. That was dirty. These are clean.”

Eddie stares at him, because when he says _full of blood_ he can remember, all of a sudden, the sudden spray of blood across Richie’s face. In the stinging moments of incomprehension—the _obliterating_ pain that his body floundered trying to convey to him—Richie’s horrified expression was not quite the first, but one of the earliest warnings that something was _seriously_ wrong.

Richie got new glasses because they were covered in Eddie’s blood.

“Shit,” Eddie says. “Hold that.” He waits until Richie yanks the other chair closer, sits down properly, and pins the tissue to his forehead.

Richie looks odd without his glasses on. They don’t have the magnifying effect of the glasses of their childhood—and thank god, Eddie likes Richie’s eyes as much as (more than) the next person, but it was a wonder Richie didn’t go outside on a sunny day and burn his eyes out like they used to roast ants with a magnifying glass. But Eddie’s used to the black lines around Richie’s eyes, making them seem to take up more of his face, interrupting the slashing lines of Richie’s brows.

Richie’s very close.

Eddie pulls the brown bottle of hydrogen peroxide out of the mesh pocket in the side of the toiletry bag and Richie tilts his head all the way back, leaning away from Eddie but keeping his elbow propped on the table.

“Uh-uh, don’t think so,” Richie says.

Eddie ignores him, going for the little travel case of cotton balls. “We gotta clean it, Richie. If you’re careful it might not scar—shit, I’m so sorry.”

“Oh, I don’t care about that,” Richie says. “But I’m not an eleven-year-old boy who fell off his bike, so I don’t need the hydrogen peroxide, thank you very much.”

Eddie scowls at him. “Are you still a big baby about it?” he asks, because Richie bitched and moaned about vaccines every year, about dental checkups, about papercuts, about pain in general. And Eddie’s sympathetic to a lot, but also. He has a big hole through his torso right now.

“There is no medical benefit to hydrogen peroxide,” Richie says matter-of-factly.

Eddie stares at him. “What?”

Richie lowers the tissue and waggles his eyebrows at him. The little cut between his eyes remains bright red, but doesn’t actively drip blood. It wasn’t that deep to begin with, but this is still reassuring.

“It’s a disinfectant,” Eddie says. “Why—it fizzes when it goes on, that’s how you know—”

“Oh, it reacts with blood,” Richie says confidently. “You get blood on a t-shirt and it’ll fizz, it’s got nothing to do with germs, baby.”

Now Eddie’s staring for multiple reasons. “It—it kills bacteria, Richie, you’re supposed to put it on a cut to clean it, everyone knows that.”

Richie’s grinning and he shakes his head, smug about knowing something Eddie doesn’t. It’s an expression Eddie recognizes—and not necessarily one he’s fond of. “Damages tissue, too,” he says triumphantly. “Look it up.” He fishes his phone out of his pocket and throws it on the table between them like a gauntlet.

Eddie blinks down at the phone and then back up at Richie. “You’re full of shit,” he says.

Richie sits back and then hooks one hand behind his head, his arm going up effortlessly, casually. “Look it up.”

Eddie, apprehensive and mistrusting, holds eye contact with him for several long moments before he breaks and grabs the phone.

“It’s—” Richie says.

“I know,” Eddie says, tapping in the passcode without looking up. “Thanks for not telling me that before leaving me to make a very important phone call on a phone I couldn’t open, by the way.”

Some of Richie’s casual confidence seems to fade a little. He doesn’t move in Eddie’s peripheral vision, but he sounds less sure of himself when he asks, “So what did you do?”

“I hacked your phone,” Eddie replies. “What do you think I did? I guessed.”

“You— _guessed_?” Richie asks, like he thinks Eddie hacking his phone would be more likely.

“The whole time I was out you talked about Buddy Holly. I made one of the nurses look it up on Wikipedia.” Eddie pulls up the web browser and finds that the last thing Richie Google searched was the phrase _when the jaws open wide_. Eddie closes his eyes, frantically hoping that has nothing to do with blowjobs or anything, but the results page seems to be full of pictures of eels.

“I— _you heard that_?”

Eddie looks up from Richie’s screen full of morays before he can search _hydrogen peroxide cuts_. “I told you,” he says, nonplussed. They’ve already had the conversation about Richie’s old school taste in music to go along with his fucking hipster glasses.

Richie’s watching him with a wariness that makes Eddie nervous in turn. “What’d you hear?” he asks.

“I—” Eddie blinks, because he was stoned out of his mind, missing most of the blood in his body, and only partially conscious. Immediately thoughts of proving Richie wrong filter out of his mind, ravenous curiosity seething at the forefront of his brain with _What did he say?_ Because what could Richie have said that would make him react like this? He has to blink a couple more times as he tries to remember.

_Did he say ‘I love you’? Did he say it and then you said it and now he’s not saying anything about it because he thinks you have an understanding and—_

He tries to get a leash on that particular rampant bullet train of thought.

“Uh,” he manages. “You kept singing. That’s why I woke up, you were singing ‘American Pie.’”

He finally finds the word for how Richie looks without his glasses. _Vulnerable_. Like a wall has come down between him and the world, which it has, and now he can’t quite see, and his eyes look soft and naked, somehow.

Their knees are almost touching, with how close Richie has pulled his chair so that Eddie can tend to his wounds.

“I mean, I would come out of my grave for ‘American Pie,’” Richie says. There’s an intensity to his stare that doesn’t match his words. “You didn’t seem the type.”

Eddie snorts.

The corner of Richie’s mouth drags up in a lopsided grin that doesn’t reach his eyes. “What, was my rendition not worth coming back to life for?”

Richie’s rendition was basically tone-perfect except for his inability to stop interrupting himself to run commentary and chatter with Eddie, but that’s not the problem.

He pushes the phone into the space between them, calling attention to the fact that Eddie was able to guess Richie’s passcode after thirty years apart, since the last time they knew each other passcodes weren’t even a thing.

“I know you, so cut the bullshit and tell me what it is you didn’t want me to hear.”

Richie’s mouth is a little open, overbite resting on his lower lip in an almost contemplative look. Then he mirrors Eddie’s posture, and when he folds his arms his biceps are _much_ more impressive than Eddie’s, even with the stupid leather jacket covering them.

“That’s some pretty big talk for a man who just cut me between the eyes,” he says coolly.

And Eddie is. So tired. He thinks for a moment of telling Richie to cut the bullshit, telling him that he’s being honest about his _type_ for once in his life. Imagines Richie changing his mind, deciding to go back to Los Angeles. Or worse—coming along, but resenting.

“I heard you talking about World War Two fighter pilots,” Eddie says. He died. He’s gay. He’s clearly having a midlife crisis. His chest hurts a lot. “Why?”

Richie seems to consider this for a moment. Mouth still open, he runs his tongue over his front teeth contemplatively. Then he nods. “The helmet paradox,” he says.

Eddie raises his eyebrows and does not look at Richie’s mouth. Just at his soft eyes.

Richie says, almost casually except for the physical wall he’s made of his forearms, “All your docs were pretty clear about what would’ve happened if It’d hit you an inch left, an inch higher, whatever.” He nods again slowly, agreeing with himself, though this is the first Eddie has heard of any of this. “You hear a lot of those stories when people are talking about their injuries— _if it had been an inch this way, an inch that way, I would have been fucking dead_.”

The voice he does for the random patient, is, he’s pretty sure, Eddie’s own. Eddie has no idea what to make of that and looks at him incredulously. Richie shrugs, an old familiar gesture, and seems to visibly set the impression aside.

“Anyway, I was thinking about how everyone seems to have a one-in-a-million story like that. Like, in shows, in media, in real life, whatever. I mean, pretty unlikely things have happened to me too.” This last he says with the irony thick as paint.

Eddie waits. Richie talks for a living. He might not like his material—if it can really be called his material, even though it’s out there under Richie’s name—but Richie, somewhere, learned to read a room to his advantage. Learned to make people hang on his words. And Eddie wants his answers, so he’s going to wait and see what Richie says.

“But I was thinking, how can everyone have a one-in-a-million kinda story like this?” Richie grins without humor, showing all of his teeth. “And I thought, it’s because the people who don’t have a story like that—the people who don’t have that one-in-a-million kinda luck—those people are fucking dead. Obviously.” He shrugs. “It’s gotta be like, after they started requiring—I think it was motorcycles—motorcyclists to wear helmets, suddenly all these people started showing up in the ER with serious head injuries. So at first everyone was like, _wait, do we really suck at designing motorcycle helmets?_ ”

“Is that Mike?” Eddie asks. “Are you doing Mike?”

Richie shrugs again. “He’s a researcher. And then someone made the brilliant leap of logic that said, _No, wait, actually_ —” This is Ben’s voice now. Richie’s just showing off. “ _—all those people who were in the ER with head injuries, they would have been in the morgue if they weren’t wearing helmets._ ” He grins again and in his own voice says, “DOA.”

Eddie fails to see what this has to do with him.

Richie makes a ridiculous face at him, something between tongue sticking out and crazy eyes. He drops it almost immediately. “And the same thing happened with World War Two fighter planes,” he goes on. “All of these planes come back with holes through the hulls. Engineers look at them and think: the Germans are aiming here, this is where we should reinforce. Except—these are the planes that came back instead of wrecking somewhere over the Eastern front. Gotta reinforce all of the _other_ parts of the plane.”

Eddie waits.

“You died,” Richie says. He’s the one who broke it to Eddie in the first place, but the words don’t feel any more real than they did then. “So that’s why I was talking about World War Two fighter pilots. Because all of these doctors and nurses kept walking in to get a look at the guy who died twice and telling us what a miracle it was that you survived that kind of injury. Except you didn’t. Because you fucking died.”

And that’s still not an answer.

Eddie considers his options and then gives up, leans back, and puts his feet up on Richie’s thighs so that Richie can’t get up and leave. His new shoes look very clean, considering that he technically wore them in the street. They look huge and insulating, like Richie went out and bought him some armor.

“What didn’t you want me to hear, Rich?” he asks quietly.

Richie considers and says, “What I said to everyone who got you killed.”

* * *

Ben’s hotel room is down on the third floor. Leaning over the bathroom sink turned out to be a lot for Eddie’s back to take, which is disappointing, but he brushed his teeth with his own toothbrush and toothpaste and he feels marginally better. About as much better as he can, considering all the things he’s either not allowed to do or can’t do on his own right now. Richie, checking his phone—Eddie forgot to look up the things about hydrogen peroxide, damn it—tells him that the Losers are ready to celebrate Eddie’s “release from captivity” (Richie’s words) “as calmly and boringly as you could wish” (also Richie’s words).

Riding in the elevator makes him nauseated. The second the floor starts moving under them Eddie scrunches his eyes shut as something shifts in his inner ear. On the way up he dismissed it as hyperventilation from his trek across the hotel parking lot or something, but there’s no reason for this.

“You good?” Richie asks him.

“Guh,” Eddie groans.

“You gonna hurl?”

“Shut up.”

“Okay.” And, bizarrely, for perhaps the first time in his life, Richie does.

As soon as the elevator stops moving he releases the handrail and straightens up. The door slides open slowly and Richie holds out his arm like they’re in a Jane Austen novel and he’s offering to take Eddie on a stroll.

Eddie eyes his bent elbow. “I will literally kill you.”

“Oh, literally,” Richie laughs, and drops his arm.

He has to lead Eddie down the hallway past the many identical doors, and it takes an embarrassingly long time. Eddie’s not quite winded but he’s not sure of himself either, not knowing where he’s going, and every time he asks Richie for the door number Richie says that it’s 69 or 420, so fuck him. Eventually Richie stops in front of a door and knocks, and Eddie tries to discreetly lean on the wall.

The door opens.

Richie announces, “Package delivered, mostly intact.”

The door opens a little wider and Stan peers around the edge to look at Eddie.

Eddie smiles at him, feeling caught with his shoulder pressed up against the wallpaper. “Hi,” he says.

Stan ignores Richie and steps right past him, basically shoving him out of the way. Richie reaches out and holds the door open. Stan hugs Eddie so hard around the shoulders that Eddie loses his balance a little and has to brace himself on Stan, who’s just barely taller than him but drops his head onto Eddie’s shoulder so that all Eddie can see is his crazy curls. Eddie blinks at Stan’s hair and then looks up at Richie for some kind of explanation.

Richie, still holding the door open, just shrugs. His eyebrows are a danger to low-flying aircraft.

Awkwardly Eddie puts his hands on Stan’s back. “You okay, man?”

Stan sobs.

Oh shit.

“Okay,” Eddie says, and tries to hug Stan back properly without actually putting any pressure on his chest. “I—okay.” He pats Stan between the shoulder blades.

Richie, eyes wide, watches and says, “Well, don’t hog him.”

“Fuck you, Trashmouth, you’re always hogging him,” Stan says, muffled into Eddie’s shoulder. He stands up and takes a step back, swiping at his eyes with the back of his hand, and clears his throat. He’s flushed but seems to have his tears in control. He clears his throat again and then says, “Sorry, Patty.”

From inside the hotel room, Patty’s voice comes: “You know what? I think it’s warranted.”

Then Bev: “Yeah, fig newton you, Richie!”

Mike echoes it. “Fig newton you!”

Eddie ducks under Richie’s arm to follow Stan back into the hotel room. It’s set up identically to Richie’s suite upstairs, except that this one is scattered with Losers: Ben at the spindly table, Bev on the couch, Patty and Mike in armchairs on either side of the coffee table.

Patty’s folding her arms as Eddie walks in. “I’m not apologizing.”

“Nor should you,” Ben agrees, his tone very _hear hear_.

The door swings shut behind them and locks with a metallic click. Eddie’s very aware of Richie standing behind him, as Stan walks over to his wife and perches on the arm of her chair. He glances from Patty to Ben and then back.

Stan nods.

“Uh,” Eddie says. “So, Patty.”

Patty smiles. “How are you feeling?” Her voice is effortlessly sweet, the way that Eddie slips into his customer service cadence when he picks up the telephone.

“I’m not bad,” Eddie says.

Ben asks, “Do you want to sit down?”

Mike is already getting up. “Nah, let him have the—”

“Dibs,” Bev says loudly, and draws her feet up on the couch.

“I,” Eddie says, and then because he doesn’t like feeling like the spotlight’s on him, he goes over to join Bev on the couch. It’s a respectable-sized couch, three cushions and all, and Bev’s tucked up in the corner against one of the armrests. Mike sits back down in the armchair.

For long moments they all just look at Eddie.

“You guys gotta stop,” Eddie says, which draws a general chuckle out of the rest of the group. It’s nice and warm in the hotel, especially with all of the people in it. He relaxes against the overstuffed back of the couch and tilts almost sideways into Beverly, who responds by slinging an arm around him and drawing him into something close to a recline.

“You want a blanket?” she asks. “Ben, go get Eddie a blanket.”

Ben’s already getting up.

“I don’t need a blanket,” Eddie says quickly. Bev’s really warm. Her freckled shoulders are exposed even in September, but she’s very warm and soft and not at all threatening, and it’s nice to be pressed up against her side. Safe, in a way.

Stan asks, “Is that Richie’s shirt?”

Eddie glances down and the hem of the watch shirt is poking out several inches beneath the bottom of his zipped jacket. “I can’t get my arms over my head, I need button-downs,” he says defensively.

The whole couch bounces as Richie flops down onto the other side. He mimics Bev’s posture, pushing his shoes off and onto the floor and drawing his legs up next to him, putting an arm over the back of the couch. “No one offered me a blanket,” he says, squinting past Eddie at Bev.

“Would you like a blanket, Rich?” she asks.

“Maybe I would.”

“Good, go get it yourself.”

Everyone laughs.

Stan says, “If you need shirts I have button-downs. They’ll fit better than Trashmouth’s.”

Eddie shakes his head, feeling his face glowing a little. “I’m good for now. I just—I wear a lot of polos, I’m sure I have something in my suitcase.” It’s the middle of the day and he doesn’t want to go through the ordeal of changing shirts again. That’s all. It has nothing to do with wanting to wear Richie’s clothes. He doesn’t know how long Beverly’s been sitting here, but he’s content to lounge here in the shadow of her warmth. “I have to go shopping anyway.”

“You can barely stand,” Richie says.

“Fuck off,” Eddie replies immediately, and then remembers Patty just three feet to his right. “Sorry, Patty.”

“Let’s get one thing clear,” Patty says. “Eddie can do whatever he wants.”

“Agreed,” Mike says, and toasts her from the other armchair. He’s drinking coffee; Eddie can smell it.

“I like this rule.” Eddie pushes his shoes off his feet and then sticks his toes under Richie’s thighs.

Richie glances at him, then adjusts the position of his legs so it’s a little easier for Eddie to fit his feet under his knees. “Just don’t stick your socks in my face again and we’ll be fine.”

“I can do whatever I want,” Eddie says. He tilts his head in Patty’s direction, behind Bev’s shoulder. “Teacher said so.”

Richie’s eyes light up and he immediately looks towards Stan, a no-doubt dirty joke visibly waiting on his tongue. But Stan knows him just as well as they all do, and he leans forward and looks at Richie as though from the other side of a chessboard.

“Try it, Rich,” he says. “I dare you.”

Richie seems to weigh his chances and then blows air straight up out of his mouth, the lone Clark-Kent curl on his forehead thrashing. He shrugs. “I’ll save it for later.”

“Oh, I’m counting on it,” Stan says dangerously.

“So what do you want, Eddie?” Bev asks.

Some answers would be nice, but they’re not exactly alone. “Uh, Patty,” he says, “can I ask you something?”

“Sure,” Patty says brightly.

He swallows. “What do you know about Henry Bowers?”

Patty’s eyes go hard immediately. Eddie’s a little taken aback, actually, by how fast that switch flicks. She says nothing and averts her gaze, looking down at Stan’s crossed knee and idly picking a piece of lint off his trousers.

“Good riddance,” she says, her voice still very pleasant.

Holy _shit_ , Stan’s wife.

Eddie’s pretty sure his shock shows on his face. He glances around at the other Losers to see their reactions. Stan doesn’t look surprised at all, but even Ben’s looking a little wide-eyed. Richie’s mouth is open again.

Patty gives a massive shrug. “I don’t approve of hate speech!” she says, suddenly defensive. “It sounds like he was trying to kill Mike, and in that situation—well, you didn’t _mean_ to, did you?”

Richie’s jaw snaps shut with a click of teeth and he looks away, staring down at Mike’s coffee balanced on the table. “I didn’t,” he says. “At the time.”

“Well, there you go,” Patty says, shrugging as though it can’t be helped. “Stan’s told me what it was like, growing up here.”

“He _has_?” Eddie says, and then shakes his head. “Sorry, I didn’t mean—”

“I’m not gonna lie to my wife, Eddie,” Stan says flatly, his expression sharp.

Well, Eddie’s not going to ask him to do that. Not like he has any real expertise on functional relationships with one’s wife. Bev’s side is warm against the incision where his chest tube was, and he remembers at the same time that he’s not allowed to sweat and that heat is good for healing. He glances down and fidgets with the placket of his zipper.

“Uh,” Eddie says. “So, if Patty’s all caught up on Henry Bowers. Uh. Where is he?”

He keeps looking down at his own clothes, at the stray thread near the hem, but it gets extremely quiet. The friendly air of the room stills a little; Bev leans just marginally harder into Eddie’s side, like she’s trying to offer emotional support with the physical.

Ben says dully, “Clubhouse.”

Nobody says anything.

Nobody will ever find Henry Bowers if his body is left down there.

“The trapdoor,” Richie says at last, because Ben broke the trapdoor when he fell through it.

“Fixed it,” Ben says. Eddie glances up at him and finds that Ben is staring straight down into his own mug of coffee on the little dining table. “Put new sod on top.”

Eddie’s heart is beating hard. Killing a man in self-defense is one thing. Hiding the body afterwards is something else entirely. It’s not that he wishes Richie had surrendered himself to the police—without the protective fog around Derry that makes people not care what happens to others, he has no reason to believe Richie would ever leave prison; and if Richie were in prison when Eddie woke up, he doesn’t know what he would do. But.

It might be the worst thing they’ve done to a human being. Any of them. A clown is one thing. A man is something else.

He closes his eyes, thinking of their old hideout, the place that was just theirs. Dust and sunlight filtering through that little square in the roof. His mother never would have approved of him playing under the earth with the Losers, down in the Barrens, that dirty place with those dirty children who were his friends.

He used to climb in the hammock with Richie down there. Used to read over the comic books Bill was trying to draw himself, give him feedback; he was one of William Denbrough’s first readers! And now Bowers is down there. And Bill and Ben put him there, but it feels like an invasion all the same.

“Did you—” He clears his throat again and has to lean away from Bev to cough into his elbow. Then he says, “Did you have to put the trapdoor back together?”

There’s a faint scratching sound; Eddie checks and finds that Ben is dragging his thumbnail across the woodgrain on the table.

“Yeah,” he says. “You saw how hard it was for us to find. And we knew that it was there in the first place. You can’t even hear that it’s hollow. The boards must have rotted, I don’t know.”

“But—” Parts of his brain that watched crime drama with Myra in the evenings—she was as fascinated as she said she was disgusted and horrified; she said that they were too dark and awful television even as she buckled down for the next episode of _Law & Order: SVU_—are whirring, teaming up with the risk analyst part of his brain. He takes a deep breath. “Could it look like he’d fallen through the trapdoor? And died down there?”

There’s a silence as they all consider that. The way that Ben suddenly plummeted through the earth, the wood compromised after twenty-seven years in the suburban swamp that is the Barrens. The astonishing fact that the clubhouse rafters had even held, dirty and dusty and full of spiders but still preserved as though by something outside of time.

“No,” Ben says. “He took an axe to the skull. That’s gonna do something to the bone. They’re gonna know how he died, if they ever find him.” There is basically no inflection to his voice.

Eddie’s stomach twists, thinking about how Mike was suspended over the tomahawk, even though as far as the Derry Public Library knows he had nothing to do with the broken displays.

“Your work,” he says to Mike.

Mike closes his eyes. “Yeah. I know. But I think it would be a longshot, if anyone even cares enough to investigate.”

Eddie closes his eyes too and covers his mouth. He hates this part of himself—the one connecting the dots, seeking patterns, even when there’s no reason for any outsiders to assume there’s a connection—except the _timeframe_ , and the murder weapon, and the way that Mike is planning to leave town, the state, maybe even the country if he was serious about going to visit Bill in Europe. He can’t help but think of some kids tromping through the Barrens, finding the door, walking down there and discovering something out of their nightmares.

Eddie knows what that feels like, after all.

The kids would call the police. Now that the veil or whatever it is is off of Derry, that’s the logical thing to do, right? Parents will care when their kids say _Listen, this is what happened_ instead of saying _This is what comes of hanging out with those dirty boys_ or _We can’t afford to keep buying you new glasses!_ or _Have you been playing down there? Playing with boys? What are you doing?_

The Irish cop came to confront them about the dam in the Kenduskeag, and though Eddie knows the man is probably either dead or a nonagenarian now or something, Eddie imagines him climbing down the ladder to take a look at the body. Forensic investigations opening up. Surely there are dental records for Henry Bowers, who was institutionalized for his entire adult life. He was in the custody of the state of Maine. Placing a time of death relative to his escape—and the Derry Public Library had a break-in and a destroyed display right around the same time—and Mike had a key—

“Eddie,” Ben says.

Eddie opens his eyes and looks at him, at his painful earnestness.

Ben visibly swallows. Then he says, “We buried him. He’s not just there in the clubhouse. He’s under it. And no one’s going to find him.”

Bev says quietly, “I hate the thought of him down there.”

Exactly.

“That place was ours,” Eddie agrees.

“I hid from him down there, once,” she says. “He and his friend walked right over the top of it. They were looking for a treehouse. They never thought…” She shakes her head.

“Yeah,” Richie says, voice too loud and blasé. Everyone looks at him. He shakes his head. “Well, the only one who ever thought about what was under Derry was Bill, wasn’t he?”

“Yeah,” Ben says softly. He grabs his coffee suddenly and drinks from it, large gulping swallows that Eddie can hear from over here. Then he sets the mug down.

“It’s over,” Mike says.

“Is it?” Stan asks.

“It is,” Mike says, “because if they find him, and if they figure out who he is, and if they put all those pieces together, they’re going to go after me for it anyway. And I intend to be long gone.”

Richie folds his arms up behind his head and stretches. Eddie looks down at where his toes are jammed under the crooks of Richie’s knees, the way his thighs shake slightly as he strains. Then Richie relaxes and puts his arms back down.

“Mrs. Uris, what do you know about the clown?”

“You can call me Patty, Richie,” she says. “Or Pat. Or Patricia.” She leans to the side a little, her hand reaching up for Stanley’s, and they loop together over the back of the chair. “Stanley’s psychic,” she says matter-of-factly.

Everyone, including Stan, blinks at this pronouncement.

Bev twists on the couch to make eye contact with her. She’s clearly choosing her words carefully, cautious as she says, “When you say psychic…”

“I mean he knows things he can’t know,” Patty replies, just as easily. “He knew we should move to Georgia. Trainor, Georgia. I’d never even heard of the place until I was looking for jobs. We were just out of school, we were poor. He told me not even to apply to anywhere else.”

Stan grimaces. “I didn’t mean you couldn’t apply for anywhere else.”

“You said Georgia was it,” Patty says. “And you were right.”

Stan blinks twice and then colors so pink that Eddie’s a little worried about him.

“And then,” Patty says, “you said, ‘The turtle couldn’t help us.’” These words she pronounces so carefully she sounds like she’s reciting Shakespeare.

There is a silence in the wake of it.

“Uh,” Stan says.

Patty turns her head to look at him, all calm concern. Eddie lowers his eyes immediately, feeling uncomfortable and not sure why. “Do you remember?” she asks. “I was filling out applications, and your eyes got all funny, and you said, ‘The turtle couldn’t help us.’” This time Eddie recognizes the falling cadence of her voice—it’s Stan’s words, not the way that Richie does impressions, but in the way that two people who have grown together know each other’s intonations and can invoke them effortlessly. “And I asked you what you meant, and you said you didn’t know what I was talking about. And you have a funny sense of humor, Stanley—I love you, but you do—but you don’t lie to me.”

Eddie sees her turn her head in his peripheral vision and looks up. She makes eye contact with each of the other Losers, her expression almost defiant. “Stanley doesn’t lie ot me,” she says.

Eddie’s stomach rolls.

 _Don’t you lie to me, Eddie, I know you’ve been running around with that Marsh girl and the Tozier boy, I can see the dirt on you, go take a bath right now and you better scrub, mister, I don’t want you getting sick, it makes_ me _sick, how can you look me in the eye and lie to my face like that, whose child are you—_

He pitches his head sideways into Bev’s shoulder.

“You okay?” Bev asks.

“Dizzy.”

She shifts a little bit, moving her arms so her lap is free. “You can lie down if you want.”

“I’m okay.” Then he remembers that he needs to make sure Beverly’s okay with him hanging off her like this, effortless as it feels. “Am I too heavy, or—?”

“You’re fine, sweetie,” she replies, and pats the top of his greasy, greasy head.

Patty is politely quiet while this exchange happens, and then she says, “So if Stanley tells me about a clown that he forgot all about for most of his life—then he believes there’s a clown. And seven people’s a little big for _folie a deux_ , or whatever you call it. And I saw the scars that night—after you called, Mike—” Mike inclines his head almost guiltily. “—Stan had scars around his face that I’d never seen before, and we’ve been married for sixteen years, I would have noticed. They asked me at the hospital how he got the scars on his face and I didn’t know what to tell them, because they weren’t there until then.”

Stan’s blush has faded. Completely disappeared, actually. He’s gone deathly pale. And there are no scars on his face now.

“So, either Stan’s mentally ill and all of you are going along with it—which seems unlikely after twenty-something years apart—or there’s a clown.” She pauses for a moment and then says, “And then I saw how you all were after Eddie got hurt, and I decided no one’s playing games here. Stan’s completely sane.”

Stan gives a short humorless laugh.

“I mean, for a grown man obsessed with birdwatching, sure,” Richie says. “Sanest of all of us.”

Patty pauses for a moment and then says, “When I got in, I don’t think you could have lied to me either.”

Eddie looks at Richie almost automatically, trying to figure out whether Patty means _you_ the group or _you_ Richie Tozier. He has the fascinating experience of watching Richie blush all the way up from his throat to his ears. He looks up at the ceiling, not making eye contact with anyone.

“Well, yeah, I was a little bit stuck on The Ramones when you arrived,” he says in an airy voice that doesn’t match his expression at all. “And a nurse was yelling at me for singing too loud. You know what they say about singing—you can’t hide anything when you do it. I truly did wanna be sedated.”

“Then why did I have to wrestle you into a chair?” Ben asks dryly.

“Just wanted to see if the muscles were for show,” Richie replies immediately, which makes Eddie blush inexplicably. Ben coughs into his coffee.

Stan offers, “Mike’s pretty sane.”

“Eh,” Mike says, which makes everyone laugh.

“So,” Patty says. “Not much seemed important after… all that. I asked Bill’s wife—did you know she’s a movie star?” She sounds enchanted by the concept.

“Patty doesn’t like Bill’s books,” Stan reports with something like glee. “But she likes Audra’s movies.”

“You shouldn’t have told him that!” Patty says. “I didn’t want to hurt his feelings!”

To the Losers, Stan says, “He just said, ‘I don’t blame her.’” He smiles at his wife. “You didn’t hurt his feelings at all.”

Patty’s voice sounds faintly wounded. “It’s rude.”

“Darling,” Richie twangs, lowering his head and affecting a Deep South accent, “you’re in a room with me. By comparison, nothin’ you do or say can be rude.”

There’s a brief pause and then Stan responds in a startlingly good Deep South accent too: “Don’t you _darlin’_ my woman, Tozier, ’less you wanna take this ou’side.”

Richie recoils so hard he lifts his feet off the table and curls in on himself as he laughs. “Holy shit!”

“Get good,” Stan invites him flatly in his own voice.

“Holy _shit_!” Richie repeats, delighted.

“Your woman?” Bev echoes coolly.

“Oh, I don’t mind,” Patty replies. “I own him too.”

Richie seems unable to cope with this and keels sideways onto Eddie’s legs, still cackling. Eddie winces at the sudden weight but doesn’t move. “I can’t,” Richie mumbles. “I love her. I have never been happier. Fuck.”

“Fig newton,” Mike corrects.

“Fig newton me,” Richie murmurs to the room at large.

Bev shakes her head.

“And, um,” Patty says, and they all look back at her. She’s blushing. She blushes very prettily, little flags of color on her cheeks instead of an all-over flush like the rest of them. “Stanley says that you all talked, when he arrived in Derry?”

“We did,” Ben says hesitantly. Like the rest of them, he can sense that this is delicate ground, so Eddie is glad that of all of them Ben responds to it.

“And—and none of you have children,” Patty says.

“Oh, please don’t make Richie tell his vasectomy story again,” Bev groans.

Richie sits up, expression bright.

Eddie says, “His vasectomy spontaneously reversed but he still has no children. And—” He grimaces. He and Myra never had sex often enough for it to be a concern, especially in recent years, but they decided not to use birth control either. Eddie thinks, quietly, that if he’d wanted to use birth control but she’d had her heart set on children, he couldn’t have trusted any condoms left in the house with her. He would have had to sneak out and get a vasectomy too, disgusting as it would make him feel to hide that from her. She wouldn’t have accepted his _no_ , and that’s part of why Eddie never bothered to give it. “—most of us had the opportunity, but no children.”

“Well,” Patty says. Her lips press together and she tries again. “We’ve been trying for fifteen years. And—doctors said there was nothing wrong. But—I think, based on what you said, Stanley—there was something to it. You know.”

Bev asks, “Do you ever dream, Stan?”

He arrived at the restaurant after the revelation about Bev’s dreams, just as they were all opening up their fortune cookies, looking like a madman with bandages wrapped up both his forearms. He heard what she said.

“Not about you all,” Stan says. “Sorry. I didn’t remember you guys at all. And—I don’t remember any turtle. But—” He looks back at Patty. “I believe that I said it. I just don’t remember saying it.”

“Richie?” Bev asks.

Eddie looks across the couch at Richie.

Richie beams. “Only the hot wet dreams about Eddie’s mom.”

“If I could pick my legs up, I’d kick you in the face,” Eddie tells him.

“Oh!” Richie sits up and yanks his glasses off. “Eddie hit me in the face and made me bleed, take a look, guys!”

* * *

Ben, Mike, and Patty have all heard the thing about hydrogen peroxide, and they are so rarely on Eddie’s side that he is forced to concede that Richie’s right. Internally. Out loud, he’s still withholding that particular acceptance. Richie looks smug anyway, which is part of why Eddie’s refusing to admit it.

With Eddie’s questions satisfied, Ben becomes fixed on planning. He has a pad of hotel paper and starts asking everyone what they want for lunch. Eddie can’t think of a single food that isn’t fig newtons right now, but Ben is being insistent on accommodating everyone’s needs.

“Gotta admit, I have been better about the kosher thing in my whole life,” Stan says drily when Ben turns to him.

“Did you eat shrimp again?” Patty asks.

Stan did, indeed, eat shrimp at the Jade of the Orient. He was shaking when he came in and looked about an inch away from death (which was truer than any of them knew at the time) and everyone was so concerned he was going to keel over that Mike ordered him a Coke and brought him a plate from the buffet. Mike looks stricken when he realizes he was responsible for this breach.

“I can’t help it,” Stan says seriously. “I can’t stay away from those prawny bastards.”

Eddie expects Patty to respond with the faint disapproval she’s been showing for swear words in general, but she surprises him by bursting into giggles.

Richie is watching too. “Prawny bastards?” he repeats slowly, like he can’t believe those words came out of Stan’s mouth.

“Richie, did you or did you not call a supernatural entity that was actively trying to kill you ‘a sloppy bitch’?” Eddie asks.

Patty is still giggling and at this she tips sideways into Stan’s chest. Stan puts an arm around her and holds her there.

“I did,” Richie allows. He sounds disappointed in himself.

Ben is still holding his pad of paper and a ballpoint pen with the hotel’s logo on it. He’s staring at Stan. “Do you want shrimp?”

“No,” Stan says.

Ben turns back to Eddie.

“Uh,” Eddie says. “I’m supposed to have protein and lots of calories.” He swallows and then admits, “And I don’t know what I’m actually allergic to or not, I didn’t have any reactions while I was in the hospital, but I decided a full allergy panel was too expensive.”

“Ah, the American healthcare system,” Mike says dreamily.

Richie is still twinkling at Eddie. “What happened to ‘if I eat a cashew, I could realistically die’?”

“I’m not taking criticism from a man who doesn’t recognize his own shows when he hears them,” Eddie replies.

Ben gives up on all of them. “Beverly, what do you want for lunch?”

“How about sandwiches?” Bev asks, perpetually reasonable.

Eddie knows he needs to get up from the couch and put on a warmer coat and get ready to go to the store so he can pick up his stuff from the pharmacy. He’s really comfortable, though, and his brain has the faint fogginess that tells him it’s getting ready for another nap, whether or not it plans to cooperate. He looks down with faint resignation at his own shoes.

“What?” Bev asks, so quiet that only he can hear her.

He shakes his head. “Just tired.”

“You don’t have to go to the store,” Bev says reasonably. “If you want something, one of us can pick it up. I’ll pick it up if you want.”

He shakes his head. “No, I want to walk.” He needs to walk, actually, needs to keep moving. He feels like a shark. If he doesn’t keep eating up the ground under his feet he doesn’t know if he’ll ever move again.

Then he imagines creeping at a snail’s pace through the aisles of a grocery store. He used to get so angry at slow walkers in New York—and not regular anger, anger that burned real hot, anger that made him understand why people always talked about erupting like volcanos, when he’d never felt anything like that in his life. He doesn’t want to be that guy. Doesn’t want to hear the impatient sighs of people behind him, doesn’t want to find he doesn’t have the energy to turn and demand what their problem is, doesn’t want to shuffle by pretending he doesn’t hear anything.

“Maybe not,” he mutters, tilting his head all the way back onto Bev’s shoulder. Then he remembers that he stinks and sits up again. “Sorry, I know I’m gross—”

“We hung out in a sewer together,” Bev reminds him. “Twice.”

Eddie gingerly lowers his head again.

“I know we were talking about doing dinner,” Stan says, “but it can be a weird hotel kitchenette hangout. Anything can be a dinner if you try hard enough.”

Mike offers, “Technically dinner is just a term indicating the largest meal of the day.”

“I’ve heard that,” Patty agrees. “We can do dinner without it necessarily being supper.”

“All of you are making stuff up,” Eddie mutters, still a little bitter about the hydrogen peroxide thing.

Ben and Richie go to the store. Eddie doesn’t truly understand that Richie’s planning on picking up his prescriptions until Richie is standing in front of the couch at that odd half-stoop that’s gonna give him neck problems.

“Eleven one seventy-five?” he says nonsensically.

Eddie stares at him. It’s a number out of Richie’s mouth that isn’t four-twenty or sixty-nine, so it takes him a moment to cotton on that it’s his own birthday.

“Oh,” Eddie says. “You don’t have to pick up my prescriptions, I can wait until—” Richie’s expression goes so blandly disbelieving he looks ten seconds away from death. Eddie glares at him. “I’m fine.”

“I know you’re fine.” He lifts up one grasshopper leg and nudges Eddie with the toe of his shoe. He bought new shoes at some point too, and thank god, because if he was still running around with his sewer-shoes and he touched Eddie with one Eddie would have to scream. “Drugs are for keeping you fine.”

Eddie has been prescribed so many drugs in the interest of warding off infection, pain, fluid buildup, and all manner of things, that he cannot remember how many prescriptions he currently has waiting for him. He also has no idea what the copays are going to cost, but he has a suspicion it’s going to be bad.

“I can pay you back,” Eddie says.

Richie tilts his head back and starts snoring again. It’s probably one of the least attractive gestures a person can make. Eddie’s eyes still snap to his Adam’s apple.

Fuming at himself and Richie both, Eddie says, “I don’t remember how much stuff there is. It’s on my papers upstairs.”

“Gotcha,” Richie says, snapping upright again. That’s twice he’s done that now. Twice is a pattern. Eddie is… concerned.

_Are you going to be like this the entire time we’re home?_

“Other requests?” Richie asks.

He already knows Richie for new shoes, dry shampoo, and a fuckton of candy that he barely made a dent in. Where did all that candy go? He hopes Richie didn’t eat it all, partially because now he’s craving chocolate and partially because he would be concerned about Richie’s teeth.

Richie leaves his toothbrush and toothpaste out on the counter when he stays in a hotel. There’s no travel cap, no accommodating smaller sizes that would indicate Richie did anything other than throw his main toothbrush into his bag and head out to Derry.

He and Richie use the same kind of toothpaste.

“No,” Eddie says. “I’m—I’m fine. I’m all set.”

Richie winks at him and says, “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do!” as he and Ben leave the hotel room.

Eddie has another little stab of panic when he again remembers that he doesn’t have a phone, but then he reminds himself that he’s in a hotel room with four other people, all of whom presumably have the ability to contact emergency services if necessary, and anyway Eddie has some kind of a duty to entertain them as they entertain him in turn. It’s just a reflex from years of business meetings that should have been emails—here is Eddie’s computer to hand, ready with an entire world of amusements for him to distract himself with.

He really does feel tired.

And hungry, weirdly. Thinking about the doll-sized portions of what he was allowed to eat in the hospital—not that he can blame them based on how frequently he vomited—just makes him want food. Not in the way that he’s been hungry for most of his life, feeling the emptiness in his gut and resigned to filling it in the near future or trembling from low blood sugar. His body was a disobedient robot that didn’t respond to maintenance in tried and true ways. Eating, no matter what he put in his stomach, always left him feeling a little bit off, a little bit queasy. And when he went to his doctor about food allergies, his doctor told him about restricting his diet to rule out things that might be causing a reaction. He tried it but it never seemed to do anything.

He’s absolutely fantasizing about cookies right now, thanks to Patty. Fig newtons, dense and sticky in his teeth. Oreos he snuck out of the cabinet when he was a kid and crunched in silence, standing in his mother’s kitchen, afraid to be caught. One time in college he ate a whole tin of shortbreads in one sitting and they filled up his stomach like a meal. Snickerdoodles with the cinnamon sugar coming straight off them and coating his tongue. Chocolate chip cookies warm and soft or guiltily picked out of a Chips Ahoy package, hard little knobs of chocolate mashed in his molars. He would eat raw cookie dough right now. And he has opinions about salmonella and the American poultry industry. But he would absolutely just cram raw cookie dough in his mouth right now.

He doesn’t say any of that. Instead, he sits and listens while Stan, Patty, Mike, and Bev compare travel plans. Bev keeps looking to Eddie for his input, but it quickly becomes clear that Eddie knows even less about what’s going on than he thought.

“How are we doing cars?” Eddie asks. He’s creaky with phlegm again and he sits up and scoots a little further down the couch so he can cough without getting germs on Bev. Mike wordlessly passes him a box of tissues.

“I flew here,” Bev replies. “Ben drove, so he has the car. Mike has his car, Patty—did you fly or drive?”

“We flew,” Patty replies, as Stan blanches a little bit at the mention of how he arrived in Derry in the first place. “We’re flying home.”

“And Bill wanted a favor—wants to know if one of us will hang on to Silver,” Mike says.

Eddie blinks a couple of times before he remembers—Silver! Bill’s bike, Silver! As much a part of Bill as a child as his hair or his shorts or his stutter. Silver made Bill into Big Bill Denbrough, to the point where when Eddie ran into Bill downtown after the pharmacy he stepped up onto Bill’s rear-wheel without thought. The bike was too big for the boy then, but Bill going fast down the road with his feet splayed out to show they were off the pedals and he was just coasting—that made Bill seem bigger than any of them, that was what turned being Bill’s friends into running with Bill Denbrough.

Eddie never rode on the back of Bill’s bike when they were kids—riding double, they called it. He was full of ferocious pride about it, didn’t want anyone to drag him around, wanted to move under his own power, didn’t want to be the baby. Georgie rode on Bill’s handlebars a couple of times, shrieking with joy, when they were kids, until Sharon Denbrough found out and forbade it, and then Georgie went to school and started getting his own friends and stopped begging so much to be allowed around Eddie and Richie and Stan. Eddie associated that with a young child; would never have permitted himself to be driven around on Bill’s handlebars. Even when he broke his arm and was too exhausted and shocky to walk under his own power, Mike put him in the basket of his bike instead of Bill putting him on Silver, and that was okay, because Mike carried meat in that basket and Eddie felt like meat, clutching his own arm and understanding his body in ways he hadn’t before. He can’t remember ever riding double on Silver.

But Richie did. Richie wouldn’t hug Bill in the street with the same abandon with which he threw himself at Eddie, but he rode double on Silver. The bike was big enough and Bill went faster than any of them. Eddie can remember Richie plastered up against Bill’s back, all wild hair and big eyes and sharp nose. He remembers feeling… jealous.

At the time he chalked it up to “wish I could go that fast, my mom would never let me.” Now Eddie’s reading through the lens of hindsight he wonders how badly he wanted to be looking over Bill’s shoulder, seeing the world like he did, borne away by him. And—he suspects a little—his memory might be colored by how badly he wants Richie close to him now. Ah well.

“He left Silver in Derry?” Eddie asks.

Mike shakes his head. “He’s in the back of the truck, didn’t you see?”

“Richie took it out and put it in Ben’s car to go to the hospital,” Bev replies. “We’re kind of playing hot potato with Silver.”

“I can’t believe he found it,” Stan murmurs.

“Doesn’t he want it?” Eddie asks.

Patty looks nonplussed.

Stan holds her hand and explains, “Silver was Bill’s bike when we were kids. He was hooked on _The Lone Ranger_ , you know.”

Eddie and Mike cry, _“Hi-yo, Silver, awaaaaay!”_ in unison. Bev laughs and Eddie breaks down coughing again.

“He found it in a pawn shop in Derry,” Stan goes on. “Didn’t even remember selling it. Some kind of miracle.”

Patty smiles and just listens.

“Stan took better care of his bike than any of us,” Eddie tells her.

“But Bill went the fastest,” Stan says.

“Bill Denbrough biked to beat the devil,” Eddie says without really think about it. The words come out like some kind of sacred pronouncement.

Patty closes one eye and squints, smiling. “Does the devil bike pretty fast?”

“Oh, the fastest,” Eddie says.

“Not anymore though,” Bev replies. “He went down to Georgia. Been to any fiddling contests lately?”

“Oh, who has the time?” Stan asks as Patty grins.

“I do love that song,” Mike murmurs, a little dreamily.

They go back to discussing travel plans. Stan and Patty are flying back to Georgia at their earliest convenience—Patty took some emergency time off work for a family crisis (there’s a certain sharp defiance in her face when she says this that no one presses, though Stan still looks sick and pale at the mention) but she’d like to get home soon. Eddie is immediately abashed that she would take off work while he was in the hospital despite that she barely knows him at all, only knows that Stan had a crisis and didn’t want to leave while Eddie was still an inpatient. He didn’t have to do that—and she really didn’t have to do that. Bill left for work and Eddie doesn’t blame him at all.

He’s definitely putting off calling his workplace. They have definitely fired him by now.

Eddie tries hard not to think about that any more than he thinks about his lack of a phone.

Ben drove here and he has a car. Bev flew into Bangor and took a taxi into Derry—which would have been expensive, but not out of the question, Eddie guesses. Now they plan on driving back. Bev suggests that they had better hang on to Silver, since Ben at least has a garage and a house, and Mike is planning on traveling for a little bit before settling down anywhere in particular. It would be more convenient for him to do that with a car than with a car and a bicycle, unless he’s planning on doing biking tours of national parks. Is that a thing?

Mike is not sure whether or not bike tours of national parks are a thing, but he’s sure there’s a market for it somewhere. It’s been a long time since he rode a bike, though, and that feels like more of a summer thing than anything else. At the moment the plan is to head out west instead of south to Florida. Patty tells him that he’s welcome to stop and visit in Trainor, Georgia—not Atlanta—on his way to Florida; Mike smiles and thanks her, but he’s definitely planning on going to Yellowstone before the weather turns. Did they know that the Yellowstone caldera has been due to erupt for some time now? Eddie did not know that. Eddie thinks he was happier before he knew that, actually. Catastrophizing about volcanic eruption is a problem he doesn’t need.

Mike turns to him and says, “Now, son, do you wanna tell me what you’re doing out here?” Except Mike’s face is obscured by bright sunlight and Eddi realizes, with a slow and unfrightening understanding, that he is dreaming.

He gets to his feet—he’s been crouching in bark mulch under the window of the Neibolt Baptist Church. It’s easy to catch him here most evenings, on his walks home. The choir practices before dinner, so he takes a detour and sits under the windows, listening. He can smell the mulch very clearly, actually, as he swipes bits of bark and dirt off of his pants. If his mother sees.

“I—um, I just—I’m sorry, I just—the choir, I like to listen to—um.” He falls silent in front of the man who is not Mike but looks like him, and Eddie stares a long way up to make nervous eye contact with him.

The man is unconvinced—Eddie can’t see his face too clearly, but he knows that, in the way you know things in dreams. “Uh-huh,” he says. “What’s your name?”

Eddie swallows and looks down at his shoes, but his feet are bare. That’s not right—he’d never do that, never walk around outside without shoes or socks on—this is Maine, there’s farmland nearby, he’s not looking to get hookworms, and this mulch is bits of wood, does he want splinters in the bottoms of his feet? This is how he gets splinters in the bottoms of his feet. And his toes are so _cold_.

Usually he stays until the sky starts threatening darkness, but here he is on a bright morning and no smoke from the volcano is clouding the blue overhead. He saw flyers for a performance by the choir—not a Christmas performance, because he wouldn’t have been able to sneak away, but it’s early spring now and the cold is clear but bearable—and it’s a Saturday performance, not a Sunday. He’d never have gotten away from his mother for a Sunday, but he’s able to sneak away on a Saturday. He likes to sit with his knees tucked up to his chest, but now he’s standing and the hole straight through him must be clearly visible to this Mike-who-is-not-Mike. The white siding of the building; the window behind him.

“Edward Kaspbrak speaking, sir,” he says, looking at his white toes in the brown mulch.

There’s a long pause and then when the man speaks again his voice is much warmer, almost jovial. “Your friends wouldn’t happen to call you Eddie Kaspbrak, would they?”

Eddie glances up and finds the man is smiling. His smile is bigger than his face—not that his teeth are large or that his smile stretches beyond the bounds of his head, but in the way that it takes over his features and produces light.

“Uh, yes, sir.”

The man laughs. “I’m Will Hanlon. I’m Mike’s dad.”

That’s no guarantee of safety—there are all kinds of parents in the world. The Denbroughs were all right until Georgie died and then Bill stopped inviting the Losers over so much and Eddie didn’t really see much of them, didn’t hear much about them except his mother tutting about how sad it was that they lost their little boy, how devastated she’d be if anything ever happened to Eddie, _it would ruin me, Eddie, if anything ever happened to you, I couldn’t go on without you, it’s not natural_ , and Eddie sat there and thought about the trainyard where he saw It.

And Stan’s parents were rigid—oh, his mom was all right, but sometimes she would say things that sounded like she was quoting something and Eddie felt nervous being out of the loop, not knowing what reference books or Merck manuals or Dr. Spock she had used to raise Stan and what his mother would do if she got her hands on them. Eventually Eddie learned what a proverb was and how some of Stan’s wild intelligence clearly came from her, the way they talked about books together and she always asked Eddie what he was reading even though the answer was never anything as interesting as what Stan was reading for pleasure. But when Stan’s dad was home Stan always became a little bit less of himself, a little bit more the reserved shell he defaulted to when he was at school, when he wanted the teachers to look at him only long enough to see that Stanley Uris was doing what he was supposed to and he was quiet and he was smart that meant he was a good kid, and being a good kid meant that whenever Stan pulled a prank Richie was always the one who got blamed.

Richie’s parents were friendly and congenial in ways that made Eddie afraid to slip up and say something wrong, though he wasn’t sure why—Dr. Tozier was a good dentist and never hurt Eddie and counted his teeth out loud with him when he was nervous, though he was never as afraid of the dentist as his mother was afraid of him going to the dentist, and her anxiety wound him up until he could hardly breathe and he felt the removed sharpness of the metal tapping on his molars and Dr. Tozier saying in his faintly nasal voice, “One… two…” He knows that Dr. Tozier was actually doing his examination, in his routine of counting teeth, but Eddie was always a little proud of having the full set of thirty-two, of living up to expectations, so that whenever he had a loose tooth or an empty spot in his mouth it made him feel nervous and off-kilter, until Richie offered to help him with a bit of string and a slamming door and Eddie shrieked at the very suggestion— _what would your dad say?_ But Eddie had been at Richie’s house when he and Dr. Tozier were going back and forth, in comfortable patter that would suddenly flip when Richie went too far and Dr. Tozier had to remind them both that he was a dad, not that Eddie knew how dads were, and Eddie sat there wishing to vanish while Richie teared up over his scolding. Eddie felt sick and furious in those moments even when he knew Richie was in the wrong, and he would wonder about having a dad and wonder if he should be grateful he didn’t have one anymore or just be grateful that Dr. Tozier’s scoldings never involved crying in front of them. And Mrs. Tozier would say, _Oh, Richard, really_ in ways that meant she wasn’t happy, but she never burst into tears and said _Richie-bear it’s like you don’t love me at all_.

Eddie didn’t grow up with the others the way he grew up with Richie and Bill and Stan, but he knew Mike smiled when he talked about his dad. And that was reassuring, but you had to love your parents, didn’t you? Eddie spent years and years thinking he loved his mother before he uncovered the seething pit at the heart of him, and then he went through the motions anyway.

“Is Mike in the choir?” Eddie asks Will Hanlon. He’s pretty sure Mike would have mentioned that, or that Eddie would have asked some questions about it if he got the sense that Mike could sing the music he likes to listen to during the long summer sunsets, but sometimes Mike mentions being busy for “practice” and Eddie’s not quite sure what happens at the Neibolt Street Church School.

Will Hanlon shakes his head. “Mike’s mom is, though, so he’s in here too. You the kid who’s been hanging out under the windows for weeks?”

Eddie nods guiltily, nervously. It’s a parent’s job to tell you when you’ve crossed the line and Eddie doesn’t have a dad, but his mom wouldn’t like him sitting there in the dirt—in the mulch, under the bushes—listening at windows. She would be irate with the idea.

Will’s smile does not fade. It puts off light like the sun. “What’s your favorite song, then?” he asks.

Every song that Eddie has ever heard goes completely out of his head, “Devil Went Down to Georgia” and all. Five minutes ago he knew there was a song that was nothing but the word _Hallelujah_ sung over and over and overlapping and driving and rising and ringing and then melting away, and even though the choirmaster was having the darndest time with it it sounded pretty good to Eddie. The audition for the solo in the set had been grueling, and one of the sopranos kept singing a high note that wasn’t written in and the choir director made them all go down the line trying to work out who was sliding up into “an open fifth” but on the spot the culprit stayed silent. And there’s one where the choir sings _no more weeping and a-wailing_ but the choirmaster can’t get them to wail on it precisely the way that he wants them to. And Eddie knows all of this and has loved it for months and showed up here on his Saturday to hear them sing, but he can’t think of a single song.

Will Hanlon makes Eddie sing for him, right there.

Even the dream makes Eddie want to cover his head with his arms and hands. Once he proves he’s really a fan of the music, Will’s happy to bring Eddie inside—Eddie’s dirty jeans next to Will’s nice clothes—and sit him next to Mike for the duration of the concert. Mike leans forward—tall and flushed proud as he points out his mother in the alto section—and explains in whispers about which of the singers his mother has a rivalry with. And afterwards Eddie eats not just lunch with them, but a _luncheon_ , a spread Eddie has never seen the like of in his life and is too hesitant about not going here to fill his plate at, so Mike distracts him by talking and then thunks big spoonfuls of Jell-O and pasta salad onto the little paper plate and, once Eddie has obediently cleared that, sets a cupcake in front of him. It’s the best cupcake Eddie has ever eaten.

But he still remembers, in startling clarity, how it felt to walk into the church with Will Hanlon’s arm over his shoulder and see any number of faces staring at him from the pews, and realize that if he could hear them outside they could hear him inside. Everyone in here heard his warbling attempt at the melody.

He wakes up with his heart racing. Someone threw a blanket over him and he’s limned in sweat, which he’s absolutely not supposed to be because of his incisions. Worse than that are the pinch of a headache at his temples and the very real concern that he might throw up.

Bev left the couch at some point and Eddie can’t see her but Patty is in the chair as Eddie tries to bat away the blanket with his limited range of motion.

“Hang on, hang on,” Patty says, and helps pull the blanket off him. It’s some kind of wool blend, tan in that way that seems unique to hotels. The second that it’s off him he feels like he can breathe again.

“You okay?” Mike asks.

Eddie slowly sits upright, feeling a scream in his chest and back as he levers himself up, and holds himself still for several moments to see if the nausea will go away. Like if he doesn’t move, it won’t be able to see him, like his stomach problems are the T-Rex from _Jurassic Park_.

He swallows. “I think I’m—” _Gonna be sick_ is right there, loaded up in his throat, but he’s _not sick,_ he’s _not_. “—dehydrated,” he finishes, and gets up to walk to the bathroom. The door is open so Bev’s not in there. He moves slowly, his balance wavering because his body’s still half-asleep.

The bathroom is partitioned almost like a jack-and-jill. In one of the little rooms is the shower and the toilet; then there’s a door closing off the room with the two sinks, so that two people can get ready at the same time. Then there’s another door on the other side that leads into the hotel bedroom. This one’s closed at the moment, so Eddie can only assume that Bev must be through there.

“You want some water?” Mike asks.

“Yeah,” Eddie pants, and sinks down onto the tile floor. When he pulls his knees up to his chest it feels like he’s sheltering his front incision a little bit. There’s dampness under his arms all the way down to his elbows from how far his sleeves were rucked up when he was sleeping, and he thinks with a little pang that this is not his shirt and how disgusting and _dirty_ it is for him to ruin someone else’s clothing like that, and he’ll have to apologize to Richie. And he can’t do his own laundry. He leans his head against the cool side of the bathtub and contemplates the toilet bowl from floor-level, wondering if he’ll have to throw himself forward to vomit again.

He hears Mike come up behind him and then Mike is handing him a cold bottle of water. Eddie cracks the cap immediately and drinks from it in small sips, waiting for his stomach to calm. “There are a couple of these in the minifridge,” Mike says, and then lays a second cold bottle across the back of Eddie’s neck. Eddie sighs in relief. “Better?”

“Yeah,” he says honestly. His heart rate is still fast, but it’s not racing like an engine getting ready to shift gear. He can walk himself back from this, he’s pretty sure.

“Too hot?”

“Yeah,” Eddie says, though now he’s cold again, especially his feet. “I’m not supposed to sweat, but jeez I’m so cold all the time.” He wonders if this sudden flush of heat is indicative of a fever and he blots at his cheek and forehead, trying to tell if his flush is normal.

Mike adjusts the way the bottle of water rests on Eddie’s spine and sits down next to him. Eddie’s just barely of a size to fold up comfortably like a child in this bathroom, but Mike is absolutely too big, one of the knees of his crossed legs pressed up into the far wall. “Your body temperature lowers when you sleep,” he says. “We just worried you’d get cold.”

Eddie pushes the sleeves of his jacket up and runs his fingertips across his inner arms, trying to see if he has the uncomfortable sensitivity that means he has a fever. A fever means infection and that means right back to the hospital, and he’s only just gotten out.

“I dreamed I was cold,” he says.

“Yeah?” Mike asks, politely encouraging.

Eddie smiles and sips more water before he says, “I dreamed about your dad, actually.”

Mike is quiet.

“Do you remember the day he made me sing in front of your whole church?” Eddie asks.

There’s an audible click as Mike’s lips pull into a smile. “Yeah,” he says, tone suddenly warm. “Everyone was like, ‘what is this white boy doing outside? Someone go find out if he’s planning a hate crime’ and Dad was like, ‘I got it.’”

“Oh, jeez, is that what they thought?” Eddie asks, chagrined. If he’d known that, he’d never have hung around scaring everyone.

“Well, not once Dad made you sing instead of you taking off,” Mike replies. “You weren’t half-bad, if I remember right.”

Eddie laughs shallowly. His back is aching from the position, but the rest of him feels better this way. “Of course I wasn’t half-bad, my voice hadn’t broken yet.”

Mike laughs at that too. His voice echoes in the little room through the open door out into the living area of the suite, where Patty and Stan are presumably still curled up in the armchair like kittens. “Do you remember it?”

“Even if I did,” Eddie says, “I have a hole in my chest. I’m not singing for you.”

Mike gives a noncommittal grunt. “Mom sang that while she was doing dishes, I can remember that.”

“You sing it, then.”

He’s mostly joking, but Mike straightens a little and draws a breath. He’s a rumbling bass and sounds nothing like Eddie did when he nervously sang the soprano part outside the Neibolt Street Church for a suspicious Will Hanlon, but the words are familiar. Eddie didn’t know he remembered them until right now.

 _“Precious Lord, take my hand, take Thy child home at last._ ” He interrupts himself. “I don’t know, man, I played the trombone.”

“You _did_ play the trombone,” Eddie remembers suddenly. “I forgot.” He reaches out and nudges Mike’s knee with his elbow. “Do you remember the good part?” he asks. The reason the song was his favorite was because it rose to a high crescendo that felt better than anything when they held that note.

“I don’t remember the words,” Mike says, but he hazards a guess anyway, eyes scrunched in something like distaste as he approaches the top of his range: _“with my dream of a world that is free…_ ”

Eddie nods and manages the highest part of the song at something like an airless whistle: _“I have been—_ ”

Mike beams. “There you go, there you go, man. _To the mount._ ” He’s grinning. _“I have seen the promised land. Precious Lord, precious Lord, take my hand.”_

In the wake of that, Stan and Patty applaud from the living area. “If you can do ‘ _Hanerot Hallaluh_ ’ I’ll give you ten thousand dollars,” Stan says.

“Man, I’ll look it up on my phone, that’s how much I make a year after taxes,” Mike says.

“Need a better accountant then,” Stan replies.

Eddie grins a little and drinks more water and sweats, and when Richie and Ben come back from the store with his painkillers he takes them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I googled "prawny bastards" trying to figure out why the hell it was in my head--it's a quote from the "Shrimp Heaven Now" MBMBAM sketch from October 2017. This means it has no place in an IT-fic set in 2016, but it was so strongly in Stan's sense of humor that I'm cheating and suggesting Stan originated the phrase.
> 
> I used to be in a Chamber Singers ensemble and "Precious Lord, Take My Hand" arr. Roy Ringwald was my go-to audition piece. No idea when the arrangement was published, though, so I gotta hope it was around in the 90s, but I've already proven that chronology is not my biggest concern here.
> 
> Richie's brow injury is based on something that happened to me when I was 15 involving a Frisbee, a festival, and a boy I was in love with but who was dating someone else at the time. The local fire department was very sympathetic. Don't be too hard on Eddie; Richie doesn't mind any more than I did.
> 
> Update: art for this chapter!
> 
> [Richie and Eddie in the scene where Eddie accidentally cuts Richie with his own glasses](https://twitter.com/miliitem/status/1234689274525749248) by [ Finn @miliitem](https://twitter.com/miliitem) on Twitter. This scene was based on my own life, so I never thought there'd be art of it where someone drew me as Bill Hader, but the universe is wonderfully surprising.
> 
> [Shrimp Heaven Now Stan](https://twitter.com/glamidala/status/1254584340815712257) by [goth stanley uris (glamidala) ](https://twitter.com/glamidala)


	7. You All Along

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Eddie eats a sandwich and takes a nap. Richie calls home. The Losers go for frozen yogurt.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Guess who wanted to post yesterday but went 13 pages over target!
> 
> Content warnings for this chapter!!!: I'm going to update the tags on the work, but there is a sequence with some body horror in here. If you want to avoid it, stop reading from "the leper opens the door" and it's safe again at "the door opens so gingerly." I'll put a brief explanation in the end notes for people who need the run-down.
> 
> Other content warnings: Eddie has some anxiety and obsessive thoughts; poor relationships to food; Richie makes a very clumsy gay joke; a matter-of-fact but not very visual wound-care scene; menstruation talk; mention of blood and bloodborne illnesses; Eddie is still heavily medicated; _Phantom of the Opera_ reference; name-brand over-the-counter medication (I am not receiving any paid promotions for this work); implied reference to cannabis; _Weekend at Bernie's_ reference; dirty jokes; canonical but politically incorrect terminology for a person with leprosy (STEPHEN KING); mention of HIV/AIDS; the persistent sexual threat of Eddie's childhood phobias; mention of child molestation; a much more visual description of wounds; Eddie gets motion sick; Eddie doesn't particularly understand gender nonconformity but he's doing his best to be open-minded; discussion of Stan's suicide attempt; Richie doesn't quite make a fat joke but he's flippant about it; Dole Whip®; Eddie is excited about boba for the wrong reasons; Beverly Marsh's childhood.

Eddie spends approximately half an hour being very nervous about his bandages. His discharge instructions were not to take off the bandages for forty-eight hours. But they also told him to change them if they got wet. And he’s already had one infection in the incision on his back, and that’s the one he’s going to have trouble changing on his own. He doesn’t want to take off Richie’s shirt. He doesn’t want to ask Richie for help. He doesn’t want Richie to see his stitches. There are so many things he doesn’t want, but the fact that he’s letting them get in the way of his medical treatment is a bad sign, right? Unless it’s a good sign, because Eddie’s various neuroses would not have permitted this kind of hesitation before his new resolutions. But it’s definitely also a bad sign, because there’s no good reason not to take care of himself—there’s rational fear and then irrational fear, and now Eddie’s got to dial back all his phobias into rational fear, and he’s never been great at moderation or self-restraint, just self-denial, and—

He knows it’s been half an hour since he took the pills because suddenly he feels a headrush crash over his brain in a wave and he becomes aware that this is the best sandwich he’s ever eaten.

“Oh my god,” he says, muffled around the food in his mouth.

Everyone in the room goes very still. Opposite Eddie at the spindly table, Ben’s eyebrows go up slightly. This is the perpetually-calm Ben Hanscom warning sign that he’s ready to call emergency services.

Eddie looks down at the remaining three-quarters of a sandwich on his paper plate. “This is really good,” he says, staring at the edges of baby spinach leaves he can see poking out from the bread. He looks back up at Ben. “You make really good sandwiches.”

Ben’s eyebrows relax as he smiles. “Thank you.”

“Are his eyes all big again?” Richie asks from behind Eddie on the couch.

Eddie insisted on eating at the table, partially because they’re not animals and partially because his back will not allow him to lean over the coffee table like the others. He frowns, peering into Ben’s face. Ben has some big sad eyes, but he looks pretty happy right now.

“Uh, no?” Eddie says, perplexed.

Ben’s smile broadens into a grin.

“I meant you,” Richie says. “Ben, is Eddie high again?”

Eddie scowls and ignores Richie, because if he’s going to talk about Eddie like he’s not even here then Richie can see how he likes it.

“I fail to see how a man enjoying a sandwich means he’s gotta be high,” Ben demurs, because Ben is very nice. Eddie’s happy to be eating lunch with him.

“Yeah, Richie, Ben makes really good sandwiches,” Bev says. “Fig newton you.”

Mike and Stan take up the call: “Fig newton you!”

Patty giggles.

“I kind of want fig newtons now,” Eddie confesses to Ben. Then he gets concerned that Ben might not feel he’s appreciated enough for his sandwich making skills and quickly clarifies, “But this is a really good sandwich. Like, I can taste all the ingredients.”

Sandwiches have always been something of a stopgap for Eddie’s gastronomic needs. Sometimes he doesn’t have the energy to fight with Myra about making something for himself, because she’s always very happy to say, _No, let me take care of it, you worked all day,_ but Eddie has never really enjoyed food, so being hungry has always been kind of unpleasant and waiting for well-done beef just kind of drags out a generally mediocre experience. Then he feels guilty for not complimenting Myra on her cooking or being properly appreciative of the things she does for him. Sometimes he just wants to eat something quickly and get back to answering his emails, he doesn’t want the rigmarole of a family dinner. _I can do it myself, Marty—just let me make a sandwich really quick, my blood sugar’s low and I need to respond to this as soon as possible, this whole profile is urgent and can’t wait until tomorrow at the office._ Or sometimes it’s all about forcing himself to eat breakfast because there are pills you don’t take on an empty stomach, so he’d choke down some granola and skim milk and still end up feeling queasy.

This is a good sandwich. Eddie went back and forth on whether he wanted to know what was in it, but Ben simply reported out loud when he was washing the spinach and tomatoes in the sink, and the meats and cheeses he pulled out of the grocery bags were in white deli wrapping paper, so everything seemed as trustworthy as a grocery trip could be. Then he just handed Eddie a prepaid cell phone and went to talk to the Urises about kosher ingredients.

Eddie got a little distracted, immediately going in and filling in contacts as a way to try to distract himself from the cooling sweat on his back and under his arms. Also Richie told him that the pharmacy couldn’t fill at least two of his prescriptions today—which Eddie should have foreseen, it being a Sunday and all—so their departure from Maine will be delayed by at least one day, which is making him feel more panicky than he suspects it should. So at some point he looked up from rapidly texting Bill ( _Bill, this is Edward Kaspbrak, can you confirm that this is your cell number?_ ) to realize that Ben was holding a sandwich out to him.

Eddie cannot remember the last time he enjoyed a sandwich. Normally he ate very little meat that wasn’t certified grass-fed beef, and this is definitely some kind of poultry but it also tastes like actual food, which makes Eddie pretty sure this isn’t just sliced turkey. He knows things about the American poultry ranching industry. He should not be this okay with eating a bird.

Richie asks Stan if eating a bird is like cannibalism for him, and Stan, sounding bored, asks Richie if he knows even anything about kosher at all, and Richie’s answer is of course no, “but what is your deal with shrimp, man?”

“I can’t finish unless there’s cocktail sauce,” Stan says perfectly deadpan, and Patty covers her face with both hands as she laughs, like she’s embarrassed about finding it funny.

“...I think that’s just being gay, dude,” Richie says.

Eddie sits in the chair and tries to puzzle out whether that’s homophobic or just a real reach for a play on “cocktail sauce” and then wonders if the joke is that cocktail sauce is analogous to semen, which, gross. Eddie’s pretty sure now that he’s gay, but semen has not gained any magical appeal since he woke up and decided to start being honest with himself.

“I think that would really throw a wrench in my marriage,” Stan says blandly.

There’s a moment of silence before Eddie can’t help himself and blurts out, “You’re telling me,” and waits.

Richie loses it. There’s a thud and when Eddie slowly turns around in his chair to see what’s happening—twisting is one of the motions his back has decided he’s not allowed to do—he sees that there’s spinach and tomato seeds and bits of cheese basically flung across the table where Richie just threw his sandwich down, and Mike, Patty, and Stan have all recoiled to get clear, and Richie is just howling with laughter, tipped over on his side into the middle of the couch with his arms wrapped around himself. Bev gives him a look like she finds him faintly distasteful and then sets her plate down on the side of his head, like she can physically put Richie away.

Mike looks confused, peering over the back of his chair at Eddie. “Uh, is that…?” he asks, and then seems unsure how to continue.

“No, I’m absolutely divorcing my wife because I’m gay,” Eddie says. He tries to make it as matter-of-fact as he can—because it is a matter of fact that he is gay and that is why he is ending his heterosexual marriage, on top of not really being happy in it—but he also feels a little bit like the room is getting narrower around him and like maybe he might start sweating again— _God_ those doctors were probably right about keeping everything subarctic, weren’t they?

And Richie’s bypassed laughter and appears to be just crying on the couch, under Bev’s paper plate.

Stan is grimacing and Eddie has a moment where he thinks _oh no oh no oh no_ before Stan says, “Okay, I was not making a joke there out of your marriage, I was—I like my wife a lot—”

“We know,” Mike and Bev say at the same time, and Richie stammers out little hysterical giggles.

“—and the joke there is not that being gay is inherently funny—would you shut your mouth, Richie?!” Stan demands.

From the sound of it Richie does shut his mouth because the tone of his laughter becomes kind of muffled and frantic and also infinitely worse.

“So it was kind of a thoughtless response and I apologize,” Stan says, glaring at Richie the whole time instead of making eye contact with Eddie.

“No, it’s all right,” Eddie says. “Richie knew, that’s why he’s being _such an asshole_ about it right now, but I, uh. Was planning on. Coming out to you all anyway, uh.”

“Congratulations!” Mike says, and Patty actually gives him another round of applause.

Bev is smiling at him. “I’m glad you felt like you could tell us.” Then she kicks Richie. “You _knew_ and you still made that joke?”

“He said _finish_ , _cock_ , and _sauce_ in the same sentence, what was I supposed to do?”

“Be fucking funny!” Bev hisses back, and then smooths her face out. “Sorry, Patty.”

Eddie glances back around to check on Ben but Ben is smiling gently. “Uh, I wasn’t keeping it a secret,” he manages, trying to justify himself, because Ben is perpetually receptive in a way that’s convenient for that. “It’s not like—not like I always knew and just didn’t tell you guys—I wanted to tell Myra first, is all, and, uh. It’s not you guys, it was me.”

Richie’s laughter dies down and the room settles.

“I mean, like. I had to be kind of high to put the dots together, which is… stupid, of me, I guess,” Eddie goes on. “And I was going to tell you because—I mean it’s not really anyone’s business if I’m not sleeping with them, but, uh. I love you guys, and you’re important to me, and. Um.” He breaks. “The joke was _right there_.”

That gets more laughs than Richie making that same argument, and Eddie feels warm in a pleasant kind of way, and also like his bones are settling for maybe the first time in his life after being jittery and dancing around for forty years.

Ben smiles at him again. “Do you want another sandwich?”

Eddie has to weigh the part of him that just wants to eat more fancy bread against his actual stomach capacity, which has diminished significantly over the course of his hospital stay. “No, I’m good for now,” he says. “They want me eating like six small meals a day or something but I don’t think I’m there yet.” He swallows and turns slowly in his chair and says, “I do need a favor though?”

Stan looks back at him, eyebrows lifted in something like surprise. In Eddie’s peripheral vision he sees Bev remove the plate and Richie sit up, but he keeps his eyes on Stanley. Stan silently points at himself, a quizzical look on his face, but when Eddie nods at him he only nods back in acceptance. Eddie turns, grabs one of the pharmacy bags off the table, and holds it up in demonstration. Understanding clicks onto Stan’s face.

“Gotcha. ’Scuse me, babylove.” He plants a kiss on her cheek, like a stamp on a letter, and Patty gets up. He has somehow eaten his lunch with one hand, using his other arm to keep Patty balanced in his lap. It’s _ridiculous_. Stan gets up, flicks his eyes at the bathroom, and walks in through the open door. Eddie picks up an unopened bottle of water and follows him.

Patty says, “Doesn’t semen look more like tartar sauce anyway?”

This sets off another small bomb in the room, obliterating the awkward silence with shrieks of disgust and hilarity, culminating in Richie yelling, “Stan, _do you need medical attention?”_ as Eddie closes the bathroom door behind him.

He sets the bag of bandages and gauze on the counter. Stan is already washing his hands in the far sink. “One on your back?” he says knowingly.

Eddie exhales and it feels like all his stress of the last hour comes out in a miasma. “Yeah,” he says. “I sweated in my sleep.”

“Gotcha,” Stan says. “My right bandages were a mess.” He turns off the faucets and dries his hands on a clean towel.

He means the bandages on his right arm, where he had to change them with his nondominant hand. The simple understanding is why Eddie asked him.

“Can you get your shirt off?” Stan asks.

Eddie nods, undoing his buttons—Richie’s buttons. Shirt and jacket don’t want to come off over his shoulders, but he grits his teeth and manages it. It’s bearable with the painkillers, but he’s aware he’s probably making things worse for himself in the long run.

Stan accepts the clothes and sets them on the counter where they’re not in danger of wetness from the sink. Eddie turns to the side so that Stan has easy access to his back and also so that he doesn’t have to look in the mirror while this is happening. Stan starts gently peeling off the bandage. It is only mildly excruciating.

“So why does hydrogen peroxide fizz if it’s not killing germs?” Eddie asks.

The bandage comes free. Stan reports, “Doesn’t look like pus. No red streaks, doesn’t look swollen.” Eddie grimaces and scrunches his eyes shut at the thought that Stan’s looking directly at his incision. “Do I wipe around the wound or across it?”

Eddie takes a deep breath and grits his teeth. “Just water. Across it. Very gently.”

Stan replies with a word that Eddie does not understand, but he suspects it’s not in English. Stan seems to think this is unexceptional though, cracking open the bottle of water and wetting the gauze calmly, so Eddie doesn’t ask.

“And you know not to pull dirt into the wound?” he asks, nervous.

“Yes,” Stan replies. “Blood reacts with hydrogen peroxide because it has an enzyme called catalase in it.”

The first touch of the gauze on his back is cold. Eddie jumps a little, then grits his teeth. Stan is, true to his nature, careful about it.

“When the peroxide interacts with the blood, it creates water and oxygen. That’s why you can use peroxide to remove bloodstains from clothing.”

Eddie frowns. “Why do you know that?” What has Stan been up to that requires so much bloodstain removal, aside from the obvious recent trauma?

Stan sounds quizzical. “I live with a woman?” he replies. “Sometimes I do the laundry?”

Eddie does not understand until he remembers taking Myra’s Midol with him when he left the house in New York, and then he feels like a moron and a bad husband both. Myra did not like to let him do laundry, but she became very defensive about it when she had her period, embarrassed about it. Eddie genuinely did not mind that time of the month because Myra never suggested they have sex then, and Eddie was a little quietly relieved by that brief reprieve from pressure, and didn’t mind fitting up against her back and being her hot water bottle on those days. He never even saw bloody sheets when they were sharing a bed, Myra took care of them so rapidly.

“Oh,” Eddie says, wondering how much of that makes him a misogynist on top of being closeted. His mother never talked to him about women’s periods. He has vague memories of Bev explaining the process in high school and being very uncomfortable, but at least he no longer was horrified that women could walk around losing so much vital blood supply on a regular basis.

“I mean, hydrogen peroxide kills germs,” Stan says, oblivious to Eddie’s meditations. “But it also damages healthy cells.” He sets the gauze down in the nearest sink and wets a second one, which he wipes across Eddie’s shoulders. This is much less unpleasant, but Eddie is very aware of how long it’s been since he took a shower and that he reeks and poor Stan is subjected to it. “So it’s a double-edged sword.” He pauses in cleaning the sweat off Eddie’s back. “Is that actually the meaning of the phrase double-edged sword?”

Something that cuts both the wielder and the target? “I think so,” Eddie replies.

“I mean, I know what it means, it’s just not usually so literal.” Stan shrugs and drops the second piece of gauze in the sink. “How’s that feel?”

Cold. “Better,” Eddie says. “Thank you.”

“Do you want to do your front one while it dries and then I’ll help you cover it again?” Stan asks.

Eddie takes a deep breath. “Yeah.”

He manages to pick off his front bandage without any help despite his clumsy dominant hand. He wipes the incision and the wound down carefully.

“I swear I asked Richie to buy gloves,” Eddie says.

“Not to gross you out,” Stan says, “but if you have a bloodborne illness I definitely already have it.”

“I don’t have a bloodborne illness,” Eddie says. He remembers trying to tell Stanley—Stanley who was always rigid and particular—that it was okay as he was bleeding out, because his blood was clean. He glances up from his stitches and makes eye contact with Stan in the mirror. “I definitely thought about that in the cavern,” he admits.

Stan smiles. “I thought about it in the hospital bathroom. You were a little quicker on the uptake than me.”

And that makes sense too, because Stan was always clean, but Eddie was always afraid.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah,” Stan says. “I tried to breathe for you. I had—” He draws a circle around his mouth with his index finger. Lipstick, made of Eddie’s blood.

Eddie grimaces. “God, I’m so sorry.”

Stan shakes his head and looks down at the marble countertop. “Someone’s breathing, they’re still alive,” he says. “I got Richie to do compressions but I was not thinking clearly, I will be honest.”

“Hey, me neither,” Eddie says, and Stan makes a face a lot like Patty not wanting to laugh at the horrible thing but grins anyway. He throws his gauze in the sink and turns his back to Stan, looking in the bag for the bandages. “Thank you.”

Stan shakes his head. “You know who wrapped me up in the hospital?”

Hopefully a medical professional? “Who?”

“Ben,” Stan replies. “I was so afraid they were going to put me on psychiatric lockdown for a second attempt, I wouldn’t let any of the nurses see me. Ben found me in the men’s room.”

Eddie hisses. “Jeez.”

“Then Patty showed up and started thinking straight for both of us. Me and her, not me and Ben,” Stan says easily. He affixes the bandage to Eddie’s back, covering the wound without getting any adhesive on the stitches. “I still don’t like her to look at them, though.”

“Easier with Ben?”

“Easier with Ben,” Stan agrees. He takes a step back. “Do you need a new shirt, or do you feel better with the bandages?”

Eddie glances down at the watch shirt wrapped in his jacket on the countertop. “It’s fine,” he says. He doesn’t really want to give it up. And it’s dry by now, and he doesn’t want to go to the trouble of getting a new shirt, and…

Stan helps him pull the shirt over his shoulders and doesn’t say anything as Eddie fumbles the buttons closed. He tucks the used gauze pads into a Ziploc bag and washes his hands. When they come out of the bathroom, everyone is pointedly not paying attention to them.

* * *

“You good?” Ben asks.

From his space in the middle of the couch, Eddie jerks awake again, realizes that he was falling asleep, and groans. On his right, Bev looks amused. Richie is frowning down at his phone and texting with a speed that a man of his age should not possess.

“I’m sorry.” Eddie leans back, but most of the group are giving him indulgent smiles. “I’m really tired.”

“You just ate. All your blood’s in your stomach. It happens,” Ben says.

Eddie kind of automatically waits for Richie to make a boner joke, but it doesn’t happen. Into the awkward silence, he says, “I’m also kind of stoned.”

“Yeah you are,” Richie says without looking up, grinning.

“Richie, do you still own a D.A.R.E. t-shirt?” Bev asks.

“You bet I do.”

“Who are you texting?” Stan asks patiently.

“Eddie’s girlfriend,” Richie replies, still not looking up.

Eddie blinks. So does most of the room.

“Still gay,” Eddie says. This time there’s less pressure at the sides of his field of vision when he says it.

“I know, she’s gonna be crushed,” Richie says.

Bill actually texted Eddie back a little while ago— _Hi Eddie yes this is Bill_ —but he hasn’t sent anything to the group chat yet today. Eddie signed into his email, then made Ben and Stan both proofread what he wrote to make sure he didn’t send his boss complete stoned gibberish to explain where he’s been since he took leave without warning back in August. That settled, he debated on whether or not to try online banking on his phone or whether he’d better give it a little bit and let some of the drugs process through his system before he tried to do anything serious with his finances.

Also, he’s a little afraid of what he might find there. He doesn’t know how angry Myra might be, and he’s too spooked to find out. What if he logs into his banking application and finds out that she’s cleaned the accounts? They have joint checking and savings accounts because they’re married, and she could have moved a lot of money out by now, even with a two-thousand-dollar per day withdrawal limit. Eddie’s both totally unequipped to fight her about it at this time and, in a way, stifled by his own guilt and wondering if he should just let it happen and try to get his half back later. And all that’s assuming that Myra would do something like that—which… he doesn’t know. He genuinely doesn’t know whether Myra would take all the money out of their shared accounts. There are some things he trusts her not to do and some things he doesn’t trust her not to do, and the fact that he doesn’t have an answer for this one is probably indicative of why he shouldn’t have married her.

You know, on top of the gay thing.

“If you want to go in and take a nap, you can,” Bev says. “I did.”

Eddie glances at the closed door to the bedroom and shifts his weight a little bit on the couch. He’s already fallen asleep on this couch once today, and while it wasn’t a bad experience overall, he is a little leery about falling asleep on these guys again. Not because there’s anything wrong with them, just because he feels like he’s failing some kind of social expectation. And if he falls asleep on this couch again, he just knows he’s going to end up slumped on Richie, and the fact that he wants that a lot is exactly why he shouldn’t do that.

No.

No, self-abnegation is not why he shouldn’t do that. He shouldn’t do that because he would be getting more out of it than Richie would realize and what if it made Richie uncomfortable? And what if Richie had to get up or something but he just hung out there and didn’t move because Eddie kind of had him trapped? And also if he fell asleep on Richie all the others would see that and—he doesn’t need that. That idea is still embarrassing.

Stan and Patty are cuddled up to each other again, but they’re a couple and they’re married and both of them seem pretty happy about it. And Ben and Beverly are clearly together and sharing this hotel room by now, and that’s a different thing entirely. Even though they’re on other sides of the suite—Ben is still camped out at the table—he keeps shooting her soft looks and Bev keeps smiling. And there are no suitcases out here, so Eddie can only assume that there are suitcases in their bedroom, and what if they need something and have to go in there and Eddie is taking up space in their room and—no, it’s different.

_And?_ he prompts himself.

Fine.

He’d rather share a hotel room with Richie.

Which is fine, because Richie is absolutely coming to New York just to— _be with him_ doesn’t sound right, but definitely to keep an eye on Eddie and help out if he needs it, and all Eddie’s bags are upstairs, and his discharge paperwork is upstairs, and he really ought to go put his new medicines in his toiletry bag and set up alarms for when he needs to take them and pack his bandages and—

“You can sleep upstairs if we’re being too loud,” Richie chips in. He’s still not looking up from his phone, and he says it in the same casual way he said _I got married_. Eddie feels himself tense up and tries to consciously relax. Richie raises his eyes and finds the rest of the Losers looking at him. “Fine, if _I’m_ being too loud, I have my moments of self-awareness, okay?”

“Do you?” Stan asks.

“You missed the concert,” Mike says.

Richie frowns. “The what?”

“Mike and Eddie sang!” Patty says, sounding delighted.

“I did hear that,” Bev says. “Can I record that as my wake-up alarm? It was great.”

“Oh god, let me learn the lyrics first,” Mike says.

Richie turns to look at Eddie with an expression of utter betrayal.

“I did not sing,” Eddie says. “I have a gaping hole through my chest.”

“Not really gaping so much anymore,” Stan says helpfully. Eddie grimaces. “No? Sorry.”

“What did you sing?” Richie says, accusatory, like he’s saying _Where’s my money?_ Maybe Eddie’s projecting.

There’s a headache pulsing at Eddie’s temples that he didn’t notice until now. “Choir music,” he says. “From thirty years ago.”

Richie peers over his glasses at Patty. “Was it _good_?”

“It sounded nice,” Patty replies.

Richie returns to giving Eddie the stink-eye, phone completely forgotten where it rests on his thigh. Eddie glances down just enough to see that the contact he’s texting is labeled _Tu Madre_.

“Your _mom_?” he demands, incredibly disappointed. “You called _your mother_ my girlfriend?”

“Turnabout is fair play, Eddie my Eds,” Richie says, picking up his phone again and clicking the screen off.

“That is not what that means,” Eddie says. “It would be turnabout if _I_ told you that I was dating your mom, which I am not—it is not _turnabout_ if _you_ are the one making jokes about me and _your mother_ , you deeply disturbed person, I have a headache now.”

Richie purses his lips and whistles a little bit, small and shrill. “Mean stepdad.”

“Oh fu—fffffruit roll-ups,” he says, remembering Patty mid-sentence.

Patty giggles.

“Fruit roll-ups you,” Eddie finishes, glaring at Richie. “I’m going upstairs. You’re exhausting.” He folds his arms over his chest and leans back into a sulk on the couch.

Bev looks deeply amused.

“I have the key,” Richie sing-songs.

“Give me the key.”

“I will,” Richie says, the _but first_ clear in his tone. “Once you sing for me.”

“No.”

His voice turns almost sinister. _“Sing. Sing, my angel of music.”_

“Maybe we could go for frozen yogurt later?” Ben suggests.

Eddie considers. There are like thirty different frozen yogurt places that have popped up on his commute to work in the last five years, ever since frozen yogurt got trendy, and he has never been to a single one. But he has seen them. And he is aware of their diverse spread of toppings.

And _man_ he’s been craving sugar.

Everyone is still looking at him, waiting for him to decide whether they’re all going to have an outing together or remain in this hotel room talking and doing nothing athletic.

“I want frozen yogurt,” he admits. He holds up his phone and looks at Ben, considering that Ben seems most concerned with logistics out of all of them. “I could set an alarm for when you guys want to go?”

Ben shakes his head. “We’ll go when you wake up.”

Eddie grimaces. He has no idea how long that could take.

“I, uh, threw out my ibuprofen,” he adds.

“I have ibuprofen,” Bev says.

“Is it gonna interact with your meds?” Stan asks.

Eddie grimaces. “She said to supplement with ibuprofen.” Feeling good reassuring pain in his body is one thing; a headache is just an annoyance.

Bev gets up and returns with a bottle of Advil. The pills are coated and sugared, so at least Eddie doesn’t get the instinct to retch the way he did when he took his prescription pills, but he still grimaces and chugs a lot of water. Actually, frozen yogurt is looking more and more appealing now. He gets up, picks up a new bottle of water—Ben seems to have stuffed an entire case into the minifridge and there’s another resting on the countertop—and surveys all the pharmacy bags he has to take upstairs.

He goes into the bathroom, picks up his jacket, and then comes back out. He points at Richie. Richie, who had returned to his phone, looks back up and immediately drops it, holding up both hands like _don’t shoot_.

“Help me carry stuff,” Eddie instructs him. He almost went full-out and said _Make yourself useful, carry my bags,_ but he feels like that would be going too far.

Richie’s expression doesn’t change at all. “’Kay,” he says, and gets up and jams his phone in his back pocket. Eddie picks up some of his pharmacy bags and realizes quickly that Richie’s strategy is _grab everything before Eddie can_ , because Eddie ends up with like two paper prescription bags and Richie ends up with several plastic grocery bags. Eddie peers in one and finds that, yes, Richie did buy gloves as Eddie requested, Eddie just didn’t see them when he was bringing his bandage materials into the bathroom. Did he get all of his bandage materials out of the bathroom? He ducks back in there to check.

“We’ll see you after naptime,” Richie says, holding the door open for Eddie.

Eddie creeps out under his arm, scowling. “I’m not a child.”

“I am very aware of that,” Richie says.

Eddie resists the instinctive _what the fuck is that supposed to mean_ and tries to calm down a little. “Naptime is for children.”

“Naptime is for _me_.” The door swings shut behind them and they walk to the elevator. “Do you remember the first time I had coffee?”

Eddie blinks a couple of times against his vague memories. They all went and got snacks at the gas station at some point in high school. He remembers Richie pouring himself a big thing of coffee and cackling to himself under his breath, and Stan going, “Oh no, please no,” but Richie had lawnmowing money and he would not be stopped. They went to Ben’s house to study, and Richie drank the whole thing and immediately fell asleep on Ben’s living room floor, and only woke up two hours later when Ben’s mom came home and Stan started throwing pens at him.

“I do!” Eddie says, astonished. He glances up at Richie and Richie just grins down at him.

“Yeah, the effect did not change,” Richie says. “I turned my sheets blue in college because I kept climbing in between classes with my jeans on. Naptime every day, man.”

“You are a child,” Eddie blatantly lies. “A giant child.” That’s a little more accurate.

Richie grins and pitches his voice up as high and nasal as it’ll go: “I know you are, but what am I?”

Eddie makes an incoherent groan and gets in the elevator. As soon as the elevator starts moving he gets a rush of nausea, and he grimaces. “I think there’s something wrong with my inner ear,” he says, and then hears himself and says out loud, “Fuck.”

“Is it just when you’re moving?” Richie asks.

The meds left him kind of queasy in general, but as soon as the elevator starts he wants to puke. “Elevator’s worse,” he says. Oh god, he’s going to have to get in a car tomorrow. Or—whenever the rest of his prescriptions come in. “How long did they say it would take them to fill my prescriptions?”

“They said by Tuesday at the latest,” Richie replies. “And they said they’d have to special order the intrusive spectrometer, which I’m like, ‘why didn’t the doc send in the prescription earlier’—”

“Wait, wait, wait,” Eddie says, trying to ignore his own nausea. “Did you just say ‘intrusive spectrometer’?”

“Yeah,” Richie says, his face perfectly straight.

“Did you say ‘intrusive spectrometer’ to the pharmacy?”

“Yeah, the invasive splenectomy.”

He’s fucking with him. Goddamn it.

“Did they not have it because you kept making up stupid names for _incentive spirometer_?” Eddie demands.

“You mean the interesting spiralography?”

“I hate you,” Eddie says, and then shakes his head. “I don’t. But you’re an idiot.”

“Aww, you say the sweetest things,” Richie says. “No, they had no idea what the fuck I was talking about, then I said, ‘the medical bong’—”

“You did not,” Eddie says.

Richie just smiles.

“You did not. You are lying to me. You are lying to me right now. You better be lying to me.”

“The medical hookah.”

“ _Fuck_ you.”

“Anyway, I checked and I can order one online,” Richie says, shrugging. “If you can wait that long, anyway.”

The incentive spirometer is supposed to measure his lung capacity and help _incentivize_ him to take full breaths and increase it. Eddie grimaces. It’s changing the bandages all over again—if he behaved exactly like he did for most of his adult life he’d be foaming at the mouth right now about not following the doctor’s orders to the letter; but his discharge papers spelled out his coughing and deep breathing exercises pretty clearly, and if he can just hold out until they get to New York—which should be _Wednesday_ at the latest, that’s only three days—but what if he regresses in terms of lung capacity over three days?

“I guess I’m gonna have to wait that long,” Eddie says.

Richie raises his eyebrows. “New chill Eddie.”

“Yes,” Eddie says. “Exactly.” He _is_ new chill Eddie.

“Give me your bags.”

“Fuck off.”

Once they get into the hotel room Eddie decides to brush his teeth again, because he still feels nauseous and either he’ll throw up in the sink (not optimal, but at least the nausea will abate for hopefully long enough for him to fall asleep) or the minty taste will help. He sets his prescriptions down on the table and goes into the bathroom, and while he brushes his teeth his eyes flick to the side to look at the far sink, which Richie has visibly been using. He hasn’t rinsed any toothpaste out of the bottom of the sink, and his toothbrush is just hanging out there on the counter. If it weren’t for the doorway between the sinks and the toilet, Eddie would go back out and lecture him on the dangers of toilet plume.

Instead his brain clocks again that they use the same type of toothpaste and out of nowhere he has the thought _I know what he tastes like_.

_Hooo boy_ Eddie needs a lie-down.

“I’m not setting an alarm,” he warns Richie when he comes back out into the living area.

Richie is already slung over the couch in the same spot and position he was downstairs. “No problem.”

Eddie’s kind of nonplussed, wondering if Richie’s going to go back to Ben’s room and the conversation now that Eddie and his stuff are secure in the room. “What are you going to do?”

Richie waves his phone over his head. “Wait until you’re snoring, then call Maggie.”

“I don’t snore,” Eddie says.

“You so do,” Richie replies.

“What’s your mom want?” He’s waiting for Richie to make a dirty joke out of it—not that he’s _looking forward to that_ , but he knows Richie. He’s done like a statistically improbable phone guessing game that proves he knows Richie.

But Richie doesn’t take the joke set up for him. Instead he holds his phone out at arm’s length and squints at it like it’s something to interrogate. “Proof of life.”

Eddie raises an eyebrow at him. “And your texting back is not that?”

“Nah, for all she knows Steve—Steve’s my manager—took my phone and is _Weekend at Bernie’s_ -ing me while I’m in rehab again.” He grins widely. A parody of sweetness.

Eddie stares blankly at him, horrified. “Is that a thing that happened?”

“No,” Richie says. “I asked if he would. He said no.”

Eddie doesn’t know whether to be relieved that Richie is… _joking_? or not, because he’s still not entirely sure.

“I, uh… don’t know what to do with that, so I’m going to sleep,” Eddie says. “Am I—couch?”

Richie lowers his phone and stares blankly at Eddie. “Are you couch?” he repeats.

“I mean—this is your room, it’s…”

Richie sits up straighter, hand coming down on the armrest as though to brace himself. “Yeah, and you’re fresh out of the hospital, so you’re not _couch_ , you’re _mattress_ , dude.”

Eddie doesn’t have anything more substantial to say than _um_ so he just looks around at the suite, gesturing in a way he hopes conveys that he has no idea what he’s doing.

Richie’s expression softens. “Sorry about the—skin cells, I don’t know.”

“No, but, if we’re gonna be here for a couple of days. Uh.”

Eddie can see Richie switching gears, going from combative to teasing. “Oh, I thought I’d sleep, like, lying in front of the door to your room, ready to fight for your honor. Guard dog, you know.”

That’s a lot.

“It’s a sofa bed,” Richie says, reaching over and lifting up the middle cushion so Eddie can see the handle where the couch pulls out. “I’m good.”

“Oh.” He’s tired. He doesn’t know what to do with this swirling mixture of relief and disappointment.

“And I haven’t even jerked off in that bed, so like, it’s pretty clean as far as hotels go.”

That Eddie knows an easy answer to. He makes a loud revolted sound, steps back into the bedroom, and closes the door on Richie, who cackles, _“I can jerk off in it if you want me to!”_ Eddie stands there for a few moments, letting the good old banter reassure him.

It’s quiet behind this door. He can see the early afternoon sun, bright behind the curtains. There would have been a time when Eddie never would have thought about taking a nap at this time of day, no matter how tired he was; he would have chewed the caffeine gum or drank water or got up and paced until he woke up. Then he wouldn’t be able to sleep at night so he’d take pills for that too. The rush came over him two hours after he swallowed them, making him come over so unsteady he’d creep up the stairs to bed, hanging onto the handrail and steadying himself with his other hand on the steps as needed. Like a kid, lurching up the stairs on all fours, playing at… something.

Slowly Eddie turns to look at the bed.

It’s just a hotel bed. No black-out curtains on the window, just cream-colored cloth, so the room is thrown into heavy golden shadows. TV unit on the wall opposite the bed, a nightstand in dark wood on either side of the bed.

Apparently Richie has no qualms about using a hotel duvet. It’s the same brown wooly material as the blanket Eddie used in Ben’s suite, so Eddie’s instinctive distaste about hotel linens are kind of a moot point by now. The blanket hangs half off the bed, and but the sheets are pulled up and—Eddie can see the imprint of how Richie sleeps. Curled like a crescent. Two pillows are abandoned on the floor; two are still on the bed. One is at the head, a visible dent in it where Richie sleeps on it. The other is squeezed in the middle so it looks like bowtie pasta, left in the middle of the bed.

Eddie stares at it and has—not quite a flashback. Strong visual memory. Richie at sixteen, sprawled asleep on Ben’s floor, arms wrapped around himself. And even earlier—camped out in Stan’s backyard in a pop-up tent, a practice round for when Stan was going to be out in the woods with his scouting troop. Richie at maybe eight years old, not asleep under his blanket but with his arms around it.

_Ah, fuck,_ Eddie thinks clearly. _He’s still a sleep hugger._

That’s gonna be difficult knowledge to get out of his brain. Good thing he doesn’t find Richie’s arms super distracting or anything, right?

Eddie steps out of his new shoes again, balancing himself carefully on the end of the bed, and then sits down to peel out of his socks. He lays himself down almost gingerly. Hotel pillows are reused and—and full of dust mites—and plenty of people have slept on this bed before him, before Richie, and that’s fine, he can take a shower—oh _wait_ , no he _can’t_.

He’s almost annoyed by the time he realizes that the sheets smell like Richie.

He grits his teeth and mutters, “Fuck,” too quietly for Richie to hear him through the door, then gives up, pulls the sheet over himself, and turns his head to the side. The pillowcase smells like Richie’s hair. Not dirty or oily, just… warm. Him.

Chalk one up for self-indulgence.

* * *

The leper opens the door and walks in without ceremony. Eddie lies still on the bed, sheet pulled up almost to his chin like a child. He can’t stop seeing it, can’t peel his eyes open, can’t call for Richie, can’t wake himself up. Can’t move at all. Just has to watch.

It walks like a man. None of the crawling lurching gait it had when Eddie was a kid, no lunge like it had in the pharmacy. It could be meeting Eddie in the lobby of his office building, standing upright in the elevator. The face is still twisted and malformed, the eyes lopsided, the hair long and ragged. It wears rags and its skin is still sloughing off, but there’s something almost comic about the way it stands there. Situational humor. Something doesn’t belong here.

Eddie stares at it, waiting for it to reach out and touch him. Waiting for it to speak in that rattling gasp.

Instead, in a completely normal, faintly Manhattan inflection, it says, “Actually, leprosy’s curable these days.”

Eddie’s instinct is to blink, but he can’t control his eyes. So he just listens.

“And they call them leprosy patients now,” it says. “Calling someone a leper is just insensitive.”

So what the hell is Eddie supposed to call it?

Its face doesn’t change, but Eddie can feel—in that weird way of dreams—that it’s smiling. It’s not a nice smile—not that any smile it could give would be nice, would be aesthetically pleasing, but. It’s unkind. Eddie is not safe.

“But you were never afraid of leprosy, were you?” the leper asks.

It reaches up with its distorted hands, its fingers swollen and short and studded with patches of broken skin, and begins pulling its hair out. The action seems to take no effort at all, to cause it no pain—it grabs big handfuls of hair and simply pulls them away, then shakes its hands clean. Clumps of hair dry as straw fall to the floor, slow like cinematic snowflakes.

“You knew,” it says, its voice almost resigned. “Even then. You were a kid, but you knew.”

And it begins taking off its rags. They come away in pieces, much like the way it rips off its hair. It drops them to floor just as apathetically. There’s a little ring of hair and rotting cloth around its feet.

“It was AIDS you were afraid of.”

There’s a rash across its chest and abdomen, its sagging skin. Its nipples are indistinguishable from the lesions except for their position. It is thin, so thin, that where the ribcage ends there’s a drop off, and then a sag to the stomach, the way that happens when people go so hungry their abdominal muscles support their organs. The hip bones stand out prominently. Instead of stretched taut, the skin looks thick.

Eddie, on the mattress, is at eye level with its penis, when it takes off the rest of its rags. There is nothing exceptional about it. It is a flaccid uncircumcised penis. The skin is no different there than on the rest of its body—there are red lesions across the pelvis leading down into the groin, and where there are normally creases and folds in skin these are rough and pebbled and bumpy.

Naked, the leper looks at him and then begins taking off its skin.

Eddie is frightened—of course, it’s a nightmare—but some of the supernatural dread is gone. They killed It. It confronted him in the pharmacy basement and he put his hands around Its throat, and choked It, and frightened It, and made It small. And then they did it again in the cavern—him and the best friends he ever had, and him half alive, and they still won. This is an it, not an It; not a She.

The skin comes away as easily as the hair. There is no blood. It starts at the top of its head, hooking its fingers under its eyelids and pulling up. The skin peels away as easily as wrapping paper, with no sound, no fluids, no grotesque jiggling or oozing. The leper pulls in asymmetric strips, and keeps talking.

“You were thirteen. No one had ever touched you. No one was ever going to touch you.”

Where the thick rough swathes of skin come away, new skin shows through. It’s not pink or raw or shiny. It’s white and clean. No lesions or boils or pus. When it tears away one of its eye sockets the eye falls out onto the carpet and bounces once, and then Eddie hears it roll under the bed. In the empty hollow, Eddie can see the flash of something dark and wet. Another eye. Not mottled and blue and clouded this time. Dark pupil. Bright, under the shadow.

_No,_ Eddie thinks. _No, please don’t. Please don’t be…_

“And you were still so convinced you were sick!” the leper says. It—he, Eddie supposes, since he’s eye level with his dick at this point, he might as well call it a he—sounds almost surprised by what he says. A little bit outraged. The leper hooks all four fingers in its mouth and pulls down on its lower lip, and that comes away too, skin shearing away in a thick panel down to its neck. The chin revealed under the flesh mask—that’s what this is, it’s a flesh mask, it’s not a living organ, it’s dead—is perfectly normal too, small in relation to the jaw, cleft in the middle.

The leper always had a long face. A long, long, long face.

“No teachers putting their hands on you—no priests, and that was the time for priests—no bus drivers touching you where they shouldn’t—no one ever touched you. No one ever touches you, Eddie.”

That’s not true. That’s not true. Eddie’s thinking of the hospital, of the nurses pulling him to his feet, of Ben rubbing his hands to warm them and then Mike tucking them into his mittens, of Beverly allowing him to fall asleep on her on the couch downstairs. Of Richie, sinking his hands into Eddie’s hair.

The leper takes off his scalp like it’s taking off a bald cap. The hair underneath it is thick and dark and—surprisingly neat, considering it was crushed under the disguise.

“And you still thought you were sick!”

Eddie remembers. Under the porch of Neibolt house, where his mother told him never to go because vagrants slept there. Graffiti and beer and spent matches and empty chip bags, the signs of people just trying to make it. Eddie was eleven and he pretended he had no home to go to, no one to miss him—and he could still feel something crawling inside him, tendrils reaching up from deep inside him for his throat.

One arm comes off like a sleeve. The other he yanks away from as high up as the collarbone, following the space he ripped clean when he freed his jaw. It’s just a human jaw. Just a human under there. Not warped, not twisted. With less detail to worry about, the leper strips out of his skin like a mechanic pulling off coveralls, or a fisherman stepping out of waders. It’s clumsy and it’s cumbersome and it’s more athletic than he has any right to be, but it’s not so hard, in the end.

“Just that it was something inherent to you. Something key in your nature. Something everyone could see but you, and you were so young, and how could you have known?”

The leper—who is not a leper anymore—no longer has a rash spreading across his chest. No sagging skin. His stomach doesn’t bulge—in fact it’s hollow, like he’s lost a lot of weight in a short period of time. There are freckles on the shoulders, up the sides of the thighs. A pale brown birthmark on the outside of one knee shaped like a tongue of flame. Sparse spatterings of hair, follicles deigning to make a cursory showing, trying harder the closer to his groin. Body hair wiry; pubic hair wirier, penis flaccid and unexceptional tucked away in its foreskin as it is, half-hidden in the crispy curls. Faint strain on the abdomen where muscles are visible—that’s a symptom of dehydration, of starvation, of deeply unhealthy practices. Eddie looks at it and thinks _that person is sick. Nobody’s taking care of that person._

And bisecting the chest, slightly asymmetrical—a deep gash. Bright red in a way that suggests it should be bleeding, but it’s not. Notched shut with sutures, the thread as thick as barbed wire. Something unnatural there, something that should have killed but didn’t, but it did, but it didn’t. A hollow in the center without stitches, punching almost neatly through the sternum—a little more to the left, the side of the body in which the heart is mostly located. It never thought of precision, Eddie thinks, in Its attacks—It went for whatever would frighten the most, and symmetry would be one more way to categorize the fear, to put It into a box, to understand It. Barely visible on the side, under the level of the pectoral, is a secondary red slash from the intercostal drain.

Eddie stares up into his own face.

“But nothing made you sick,” it says. “It was just you all along.”

And it tries to climb in bed with him.

Just clambering over his body, hands braced on Eddie’s chest, one knee reaching to land on Eddie’s other side, weight shifting. Eddie’s whole body goes taut with something sharper than fear, something trapped animal, something ready to chew through its own leg to get out, but he can’t move, he can’t—

The door opens so gingerly that at first Eddie doesn’t realize it’s happening, and then the creak of the hinges banishes the dream. Eddie doesn’t move, breathing deep as he can manage through his nose, trying to stay awake to chase any remnants of the dream away. The sheet is pulled up almost over his face.

A dark head leans slowly into the room. Richie’s glasses appear before the rest of his face does properly. He peers in at Eddie and Eddie blinks at him, at the room suddenly so dark, and wonders how much of him is visible.

There’s a phone pressed to Richie’s ear. In a whisper, Richie says, “Yeah, he’s fine,” and then gently closes the door again, leaving Eddie alone.

_No_ , Eddie thinks clearly. _No, don’t go._ His eyes are closing—his head and eyes feel so heavy and it’s the drugs, he knows it’s the drugs—and he can’t resist falling back asleep anymore than he could resist watching the leper’s transformation.

_No. No, no, no. This is my dream. This is my head, this is my dream._

The door opens again. Eddie thinks, _No_ , defiant now instead of pleading, and in response Richie walks in. He’s dressed—nothing particularly special, something like a t-shirt—and Eddie can tell it’s a dream because the excruciating detail is gone, leaving behind only something like relief as he slinks casually over to the bed.

“You okay?” dream-Richie asks him.

“I’m fine,” Eddie tells him without moving his lips. “I’m not bad.”

“You’re not bad,” dream-Richie agrees, and climbs into the bed from the other side. The mattress doesn’t sink under his weight. The sheets don’t move. There’s no warmth to his body when he fits himself to Eddie’s back and slings an arm over his ribs. Eddie keeps his eyes closed and clutches the dream with both hands and holds it to him.

* * *

Naps are a mistake. Eddie brushes his teeth for the fourth time today and proceeds sourly downstairs, jacket back on and teeth gritted against nausea in the elevator. His instinct tells him that he needs to get Dramamine or Bonine or something for the car ride—or better yet, that he should call his fucking doctor and say _what gives_? The part of him that’s a thirteen-year-old boy rebelling against authority doesn’t want pharmaceutical help.

That just means the nausea’s not bad enough yet. Eddie’s had food poisoning in his life where he was ready for the end, if only it meant he could get some peace from his body’s demands.

Richie does not understand why Eddie’s so grouchy. At first he seems amused by it—“I’m watching ‘not a morning person’ happen at like four PM”—but when Eddie refuses to relax and chatter back with him, Richie retreats into himself a little bit too. Eddie watches him out of his peripheral vision. Richie’s scrutinizing him hard, getting ready for whatever Eddie’s about to do—battening down the hatches.

Eddie does nothing. He downloads the Wikipedia app onto his new prepaid smartphone. He didn’t know that prepaid phones came in smartphone versions, but of course he’s never been the kind of person to consider having a prepaid phone before. Prepaid phones are for people who are leading double lives, conducting illicit activities, cheating on their wives, or evading the law. Eddie watches the little wheel unfurl as the app downloads and wonders whether any of those have an appeal, now that he has the equipment to do so.

_Don’t think so, buddy,_ his body reports back to him. He woke up in bed alone, of course, but he wasn’t even half-hard from having a full bladder. It’s not like he’s having graphic sex dreams or anything, but it looks like that whole part of his body is completely absent without leave. He wonders why his doctor even bothered to give him a three-week ban on sexual activity, since his nervous system seems to have decided it’s a nonissue.

And the point is that he’s not leading a double life. He’s been leading a second, bland, inferior life that he never wanted in the first place, and now he’s righting the course. And—well, he’s involved in a conspiracy to hide a murder, but there were mitigating circumstances; and he’s told Myra he wants a divorce and even if he hadn’t, no activity which could be construed as cheating has occurred; and he’s not evading the law so much as he’s evading all of the arbitrary laws he set up for himself over the last couple of decades.

He got an automatic reply to his email to his boss. This is not surprising. It’s Sunday.

The rest of the Losers meet them in the lobby. Bev hugs him as though they didn’t see each other three and a half hours ago and asks him how he feels.

He puts his head on her shoulder and says, “Naps are for children.”

“Blasphemy!” Richie says.

“My point stands.”

Unfortunately, Eddie himself is also standing upright. He’s got full-body ache, which he doesn’t think makes sense as a symptom of either having a big hole in his chest or as a side-effect of his medication. The only thing he can think of is that he overexerted himself by being stupid and not asking for help earlier, and now it’s too late for that, and he should probably take more ibuprofen.

A heating pad would be nice. Or just an entire electric blanket, damn the fire hazard.

Instead of Mike’s truck, Eddie and Richie ride in Ben’s car to the frozen yogurt place. Richie has the shotgun seat. Bev climbed into the back without discussing it, and almost as soon as Ben puts the car into drive Eddie gets incredibly motion sick and has to put his head in Bev’s lap.

“What the fuck?” he groans.

Ben drives carefully, trying not to stop and start or take sharp turns. Richie peers over the back of his seat and watches Bev petting sympathetically at Eddie’s hair.

“Okay, we gotta call your fucking doctor,” Richie says.

Eddie takes a deep breath. He doesn’t want to think about eating food, so he just focuses on the _frozen_ aspect of the frozen yogurt, the idea of putting something cold into his body. He would eat ice cubes right now, in fact. And then for the ache in his body—

“Can we buy an electric blanket?” he mumbles into Bev’s knee.

“I’m sure we can,” she says.

Ben didn’t hear him. “Huh?”

“Electric blanket.”

“Ooh,” says Ben, sounding genuinely intrigued.

“You hurting, sweetie?” Bev asks.

He thinks that if he didn’t have a hole punched through his body, he’d ask her to rub his back. That’s always done more for him when he’s feeling truly out of it than hair-petting. But also that’s way too intimate and he’s not going to ask Bev to do that, no matter how lousy he feels.

“It’ll stop when we get out of the car,” he says. “I got motion sick in the elevator too.” That is okay to say, because motion sickness is a response to stimulus and not a genuine illness.

There is a moment of silence where he can hear everyone considering the logistics of Eddie climbing three flights of stairs in his current condition. The idea of Ben Hanscom just hoisting him and carrying him up the stairwell is, fortunately, amusing in the way a cartoon is amusing, instead of humiliating. He wouldn’t want it in real life, obviously, but the mental image is funny.

The mental image of Richie carrying him is not funny. And not even because the last time Richie carried him anywhere Eddie was actually bleeding to death.

At that moment Eddie remembers that he’s not allowed to sweat, so an electric blanket is probably not a great idea. He immediately starts trying to bargain with himself—what if he just lies on top of it, like a lizard on a hot rock? Then can he get the blanket?

Then he remembers that he’s a goddamn adult and he can just buy the blanket and he doesn’t have to justify himself. He can just get out from under the blanket when he gets too hot. He can make those decisions.

Ben makes a left turn and Eddie tries to stifle his groan from the vicinity of Beverly’s knee.

Then Eddie remembers that, oh yeah, he has no goddamn money at the moment either, so never mind that.

And that’s basically how the car ride to the frozen yogurt place goes.

They don’t wait for Mike and the Urises to arrive. The second they walk into the little frozen yogurt outlet in the strip mall, Eddie sits down at one of their tables—they all look like aluminum patio furniture, but also like they’re _supposed_ to look like aluminum patio furniture, and everything is extremely shiny and vaguely futuristic—and Richie walks up to the counter and asks, “You got bottled water?”

“Yes, sir,” says the tiny androgynous person behind the counter, who sounds as dead inside as Eddie feels.

“Two, please.”

And then Richie’s coming back over and handing Eddie a cold bottle of water. Eddie cracks the cap and sips it, imagining Sarah telling him to pace himself. It smells sweet in here but it’s still vaguely chilly. He knows he’ll be fine. He doesn’t even think he’s going to puke in this frozen yogurt store.

“Are you okay?” Patty asks when they arrive, because Richie’s definitely hovering.

Annoyed, Eddie grabs Richie by the hem of his t-shirt and yanks him down into the chair beside him. And Richie _lets_ him, which is a whole different thing, because Eddie’s holding the bottle in his left hand so he has to pull with his nerve-damaged right, and he knows he’s not very strong, and Richie’s pretty big, but as soon as he works out why Eddie’s messing with his clothes he just drops into the chair.

_Like gravity is increasing on him._

“Just motion sickness,” Eddie replies.

Patty looks around at all of the stainless-steel panels that promise to release cold bacteria-laden milk solids. “Do you want to eat?”

Well not right now. “I’ll give it a minute,” he says.

At which point Richie pokes Eddie in the neck with the bottom of the second cold bottle of water, and Eddie closes his own throat so he doesn’t moan out loud. Instead a weird stifled little sound comes out of his nose, and Richie grins and lays the side of the bottle flat against him, hand almost resting on the back of Eddie’s neck.

Eddie can’t look at him. He doesn’t have the energy to do that right now.

Stan slides into the booth across from Eddie, puts his elbows on the shiny square tabletop, and props his chin on his hands to look at him. Eddie raises his eyebrows at him in return and waits.

“So do you want us to stay?” Stan asks, voice low and calm.

Eddie frowns a little because at first he thinks he means in this frozen yogurt store—which obviously, Eddie wants everyone to stay, he doesn’t want to ruin anyone else’s time and he is absolutely getting something junk-food-adjacent in his stomach at some point this evening. Then he realizes that Stan’s asking because he wants to go back to Georgia.

“No,” Eddie says, shaking his head. His jaw touches the cold plastic, just lightly. “I mean—I’m surprised you guys stayed this long, actually.”

Stan makes finger guns at him. “It wasn’t all you. My mental health is not that great.”

“I’ll drink to that, bro,” Richie says.

“Don’t fucking call me bro,” Stan replies, and then winces.

“Fig newton?” Eddie asks.

“Fig newton,” Stan agrees calmly. “Patty’s taken off work, but she has to go back soon. And I want to stay with her, but if you need—”

Eddie, feeling very young with his childhood best friends around him, sticks his tongue out at Stan. Stan interrupts himself. Richie makes a little huffing sound like he’s laughing. The only thing they need is Bill there, looking blue-eyed and long-suffering again, and suddenly they’ll be back at a cafeteria table in the fourth grade.

“I’m fine,” Eddie says. And considering everything that’s happened to him—yes, he is, he’s doing very well. He died, and he’s up and walking around and going for frozen yogurt, which on average assessment of how well people do after they die, is something like ten-thousand percent better. He glances to the side at Richie, who’s rolling his eyes, and looks back at Stan.

Stan hunkers a little closer on the table, knowing that Eddie is getting ready to say something serious.

“Are you fine?” Eddie asks.

Because the worst possible thing happened to Stan when he was alone in Georgia, and that’s the only thing giving Eddie pause—not that Stan’s walking away from him and back to his life; Bill did that and Bill’s fine and Eddie doesn’t hold it against him because why would he?—but because Patty works during the day, and Eddie’s afraid of what will happen when Stan’s alone in Georgia again.

“I’m fine,” Stan says, and then frowns. “I think my mother-in-law is coming to visit?”

Richie makes an “oooh,” sound, not at all like Ben being excited by the idea of an electric blanket in the car. More like they’re in middle school and someone has just gotten summoned to the principal’s office.

Stan rolls his eyes. “Shut up. My mother-in-law is very nice.”

“Yeah.” Eddie swings his knee out and bangs his thigh into Richie’s, just making a point. “Like you know anything about mothers-in-law.”

“It’s my father-in-law who’s out to get me,” Stan replies seriously, before Richie can make the expected _your mom_ joke. “He keeps cursing me out in Yiddish, like I don’t know what the f-f-f-f—” He stalls out, grimacing hard, and then glances to where Patty is looking over her options for frozen yogurt. He lowers his voice to a whisper. “— _fuck_ —”

“Okay, Big Bill,” Richie says, and Eddie experiences _déjà vu_ so strong that he gets a little lightheaded, trying to work out if this is actually the third grade and he’s listening to William Denbrough try out a swear for the first time.

Stanley just gives Richie a cold disappointed look, which is also painfully familiar. “—he’s saying,” he finishes, as though Richie had never interrupted.

Eddie frowns. “Are your parents still alive?”

“Dad is,” Stan replies, the same coldness in his voice as on his face, which tells Eddie exactly how that relationship is.

Richie voices what Eddie’s thinking. “ _Oooo_ -kay.”

Stan ignores this, looking over Eddie’s shoulder at Patty again. He raises his voice slightly and calls, “Babylove, do you need the—”

“Nope,” Patty replies immediately. “We need this.”

Stanley grins and drops his gaze to the tabletop in front of him, and it’s such a private affectionate look that Eddie suddenly feels a great wrench in his chest, like _psych, you are hurt pretty badly, actually_ , and he loses his breath a little for just a moment. Then it passes.

“Haystack,” Richie says, and Eddie looks around at him to find that Richie is staring at Ben from across the whole shop, frank disbelief on his face. “What the fuck, man?”

Ben turns around, his little paper cup in hand, and just about sneers back at Richie, if Ben Hanscom were capable of sneering, which Eddie suspects he is not. “What?”

“ _No sugar added?”_ Richie reads, which is impressive because Eddie can’t read the sign from this distance.

Ben glares back at him. “Yeah?” he demands.

Richie tilts his head to the side like he’s exasperated and sighs, “Come on, man.”

Thank god they and the cashier are the only people in this restaurant, because they are being extremely annoying right now.

“What’s your problem, Richie?” Bev demands.

Richie still has one hand holding an increasingly warm bottle to Eddie’s neck, so he gestures with the other as he says, “My problem is that the man can get all the sugar he wants, and I do mean _sugah_ —” Eddie’s stomach twists and he grimaces, not sure if this is revulsion or attraction or both. “—and he heads straight for the _cold milk_.”

Eddie glances over his shoulder to look at the cashier. They have leaned down on the counter much like Stan, braced their elbows, and appear to be watching the whole exchange like it’s a spectator sport.

Bev puts her hands on her hips. “Let people like what they like! What are you, the yogurt police?”

“No, but that sounds like something you’d have to give a credit card number if you wanted to watch it online, so I know my next career move now, thank you,” Richie says.

Eddie shrugs him and his bottle away. “Stop being weird and go get some yogurt.”

“I don’t know if I can, now that I know I’m gonna have to watch Haystack eat a _frozen dairy confection_ ,” Richie said, almost throwing the last words across the shop.

“What?” Eddie asks, completely lost.

Richie turns to him and with an expression of surprising seriousness says, “When you buy like a tub of ice cream, you gotta check on the side and make sure it’s real ice cream. If it says _frozen dairy confection_ , it’s not as sweet, the texture’s all wrong when you go to scoop it, it’s just a big disappointment. And as a big disappointment, I know these things.”

“Are you _deranged_?” Stan asks. “Why do you know that? Why do you care about that?”

“Because I’ve just realized that what I want to be when I grow up is the yogurt police, keep up, Stantonio,” Richie replies. He leans back in his chair, drops the bottle onto the table, and splays both hands over his own stomach. “Do I not look like a man who prioritizes real goddamn ice cream?”

Eddie is… reasonably certain that the point Richie is trying to make here is about his weight, but. Richie looks good. Big and solid and soft, and his t-shirt is tight enough that Eddie can see a slight dip in the fabric over his navel, and Eddie wants to touch him so badly, to knock Richie’s hands aside and grab him instead, that he has to stand up and go look at frozen yogurt flavors.

The motion-sick nausea is gone; instead he can feel his heart beating too fast, it’s all emotional. The more space he puts between himself and Richie the easier it is to breathe.

Mike is the only one being quiet in this goddamn restaurant, including Eddie himself, so Eddie walks up next to him and leans on him. Mike looks down at him, looking pleasantly surprised by the sudden appearance of the top of Eddie’s head midway down his upper arm.

“What the fuck is a Dole Whip?” Eddie asks quietly, staring at the big silver levers now that he can read their signs.

“It is—” Mike stops as though confused and then says, “You know, I know it’s tropical, but I have no idea what’s in it.”

Eddie pulls out his new phone and looks up Dole Whip on Wikipedia. Apparently the term is trademarked—which this frozen yogurt flavor sign is electing to ignore. **_Dole Whip_** _(also known as **Dole Soft Serve** ) [1] is a soft serve dairy-free frozen dessert created by Dole Food Company in 1986._

“ _Dairy-free_?” Eddie reads aloud. “Oh fuck that.” He walks away from the offerings in violation of Dole Food Company’s trademark. That’s not _even_ a frozen dairy confection. Eddie just got out of the hospital. He also skips the no sugar added, nonfat, and low-fat options, because he’s on a mission, and that mission is hedonism.

There are a lot of fruit flavors. Like, an abundance of fruit flavors. It’s a whole damn fruit salad up in here. Eddie stares at the different options, feeling like he’s trying to access a strategic part of his brain that just keeps sending back 404 errors. It’s frozen yogurt. There is no wrong answer. The universe is not going to punish him for making a bad decision.

Patty walks up to him, pink plastic spoon sticking out of her mouth. She has a medium-sized cup full of pink and blue swirls, sprinkled with what looks like big pink fish eggs on top. Eddie stares directly down into her fro-yo.

“What is that?” he asks.

“Cotton candy,” she says, which answers only one of his questions. “Do you want to try?”

Eddie is trying to improve, but he’s not at a state in his life where he can just share a spoon with Stan’s wife. He thinks he could maybe share a spoon with Bev, but only because her blood is literally going around in his circulatory system right now. “What are the pink things?” he asks.

Patty’s face lights up and Eddie immediately becomes suspicious. “They’re tapioca pearls,” she replies. “They’re strawberry flavored.”

This is new to Eddie. He doesn’t know what a Dole Whip is. He has vague memories of his mother consuming Cozyshack tapioca pudding. He has no idea how one would transmute a cassava root into pearl form, or how it would become strawberry flavored.

What he does know, is that cassava as a plant sometimes contains cyanide, and he immediately becomes obsessed with consuming this one-time poisonous topping based on that alone.

“I’m gonna need all of those,” Eddie says without explaining his reasoning. He’s supposed to have protein and calories, too. There’s a peanut-butter frozen yogurt, but he contemplates the tapioca pearls and their strawberry flavor and weighs whether or not he’s in the phase of his life where he will without hesitation combine strawberry and peanut butter. Is that like a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in frozen yogurt form? Or is it gross?

He contemplates the topping bar. The tapioca pearls are labeled “strawberry poppers” and are also available in a mango flavor. Eddie contemplates that sign for several seconds, wondering what the fuck the popping is about and whether he’s committed to a strange new snack food too soon. There’s also fresh fruit, pieces of candy bars, peanuts, sprinkles, assorted gummy candies, whole animal crackers, assorted movie-theater candies, cookie dough, brownie bites, cheesecake pieces, something labeled “marshmallow topping” that is clearly this trademark-infringing frozen yogurt shop’s answer for Marshmallow Fluff, and a little sign indicating that there’s hot fudge and whipped cream at the register.

Patty follows him in his investigation.

“Why are the walnuts wet?” he asks, looking at the little sign reading “wet walnuts.”

Richie would make a dirty joke. Patty tilts her head to the side and then shrugs, spoon still sticking out of her mouth. Did Stan marry an adorable cartoon character? How old is Patty, really?

“Are you and Stan the same age?” Eddie asks, more for his own curiosity than for any real need to know.

Patty pops the spoon out of her mouth and nods. “He’s a year older.”

So Patty’s thirty-eight, because Stan skipped a grade to end up in their class back in the day. Eddie remembers it all at once without ever having realized he’d forgotten it.

“You don’t look thirty-eight,” he says, because she doesn’t, she has this perpetually youthful glow, and he has the vague idea that women like to be complimented on their skin or something. Patty has nice skin. That’s a thing, right?

“Neither do you,” Patty replies, which makes Eddie laugh. “How old are you?”

He grins. “I’m forty-one in November,” he says.

Her eyes pop. “No,” she says, as though in disbelief. Maybe she’s like Eddie and trying to fumble through this social interaction by telling him how young he looks too. Eddie grins and tries to slide down the topping bar to inspect the raspberry sauce, see if it’s congealed or anything—and collides immediately with Richie.

“Whoa!” Richie visibly moves to steady him but his hands are full, and Eddie can identify the moment he remembers he can’t put a hand on Eddie’s back, because he falters. In that moment, Eddie grabs hold of the sleeves of the leather jacket and gets his balance back. Richie stands there, arms around Eddie in kind of a parody of a hug like a big stuffed animal or something.

“Jesus, Richie, warn a guy,” Eddie says. To cover how flustered he is, he releases Richie’s sleeves and sets about adjusting the way his jacket hangs over his chest, fussing with the zipper placket so he looks a little neater and a little bit less like he’s crashing into people in a frozen yogurt shop. His knuckles touch Richie’s chest. Eddie had to get up because Richie joking about his body fat was overwhelming, but there is not a lot of give there. He looks soft. His chest is pretty goddamn firm.

This was the worst idea for concealing how flustered he is. In fact, the situation is worse. Richie is _right there_ , almost with his arms around Eddie, smelling like leather and heat under the sugary scent of this shop. He scrapes an imaginary bit of fluff off Richie’s shoulder with the palm of his hand—God he loves this jacket; holy _shit_ he needs to take his hands off of Richie—and looks over his shoulder before taking a step back, just in case he’s going to bump into Patty. But Patty is standing at a distance that respects other people’s personal space.

You know. Like a normal human being.

And if Eddie’s being half as weird as he feels like he’s being, Patty has a _stellar_ poker face. This is likely, because Eddie’s being _really weird_ and she’s married to Stanley Uris.

“Hm,” Richie says noncommittally, and then he holds out one of the things in his hands to Eddie.

It’s a paper cup. The largest size they have, in bright lime green to differentiate from the pink and orange of the small and medium sizes. Patty has a small. Richie has picked up two large cups for their frozen yogurt and now he’s eyeing the topping bar speculatively, giving Eddie most of his side profile, his eyelids contemplative under the glasses.

Eddie realizes he completely on autopilot accepted the cup and looks down at it so he stops staring at Richie. “What is this?” he asks.

Richie blinks twice, short little lashes fluttering, and then turns to look back down at Eddie. “Were you just gonna put your chin up against the dispenser and—” He tilts his head back and mimes pulling the lever so frozen yogurt pours directly into his mouth. It is not hot, Eddie tells himself firmly. Richie’s tongue is lolling out. It is not hot.

“I—” The idea of having to respond to that in the English language is just out of the question, so he ignores it and says, “I’m putting this back, I’m getting a normal-sized amount of ice cream.”

Richie straightens up and grins. It’s not his usual congenial grin. Eddie’s… a little intimidated by the way his face changes; this smile says _I know something you don’t know_ , and since at the moment the only thing Eddie can think about is how mad he is that the stupid condescending grin is still so goddamn charismatic, he feels his face burn in return. He should take another step back, Richie’s way too close, Eddie’s brain is full of the smell of leather. He can’t take a step back. He is absolutely convinced in this moment that he cannot yield even a little bit of ground to Richie, and he has no idea what he thinks will happen if he does, but—

“Okay,” Richie says. Easy. Calm. Not fighting him.

Suspicious.

“Did you—” Eddie looks down into the white bottom of the paper cup and back up. “Did you lick it or something? What’s the joke? What did you do?”

“I didn’t do anything,” Richie says, but Eddie can see so many of his teeth, that stupid fucking overbite. What is he doing?

Eddie narrows his eyes at him. “What?” He moves to twist to look back at the cashier’s counter. Something pulls in the middle of his back and he loses his breath. Please don’t let that be a stitch.

He doesn’t know what his face does but he immediately hears Richie going, “Shit, you okay?”

“I’m _fine_ ,” Eddie spits back, mostly honest. He inhales slowly, breathing through the pain. It’s tolerable. He can manage it. He goes back to trying to make his point, moving his feet to turn in place and look at the cashier’s counter. The cashier is on her? his? their phone now, and by all accounts appears to be praying for death. Eddie can’t blame them. Next to the register, there’s a scale. “They charge these by weight, Richie, I’m not getting the super fucking expensive ice cream.”

“Frozen yogurt,” Richie corrects, because he’s an asshole.

Eddie has a brief fantasy about being a completely uninjured martial arts practitioner in the peak of his health and strength so that he can roundhouse kick Richie in the chest.

He wouldn’t do it. But it’s a fantasy. He’s allowed to have that kind of fantasy in the frozen yogurt store. He’s overheating in the frozen yogurt store.

He needs some frozen yogurt immediately.

“And why not?” The smugness has vanished off his face and Richie genuinely looks confused by Eddie’s decision.

“Because—” He grimaces and leans in a little more so he can say quietly, “—because I don’t have any money with me and I’m not gonna make someone buy me like a thirty-dollar frozen yogurt, obviously.”

Richie’s confusion intensifies. His nose scrunches, his brows furrow, his mouth goes wide and flat as he frowns. “Why not? I’m buying.”

“You’re—” All the air goes out of Eddie again.

Mike walks up to the counter and pays for his non-trademarked Dole Whip, looking quietly content in the way of Mike Hanlon. He has a medium-sized cup, and it’s full of yellow soft serve studded with maraschino cherries. Eddie always loved the way that those looked, really, how bright the red. He rarely ever ordered anything with them. Sometimes a Manhattan in a bar, with one of the cherries resting round at the bottom. No milkshakes or anything—too unhealthy, too frivolous, couldn’t justify them.

Eddie’s in a difficult position. Because he had a sneaking suspicion that it was either going to be Ben or Richie paying his way here, but Ben suggested the venue and Eddie doesn’t want to be like, _No, Richie, you can’t buy me a big frozen yogurt, I’m going to make Ben buy me a slightly smaller frozen yogurt_. It’s just not acceptable behavior.

But also there’s a part of him that’s maybe thirteen years old and heard Richie talking smugly about the time he took Beverly to the movies—and complaining about how Ben tagged along “but it’s okay because he’s gonna pay me back, he said.”

Eddie looked up over his comic book and squinted at Richie and asked almost suspiciously, “You’re not gonna make Bev pay you back, are you?”

He told himself that it was because Bev had the same shivering anxiety about asking her parents for money that Eddie did, because his mother always wanted to know why he wanted it, when she could give him anything he needed. And his mother was always saying Bev was dirty—well, Eddie looked at her bike and her clothes, which Eddie got the sense were _pretty_ for girls but were definitely worn in and made over and restyled—and decided it was more about Bev working with what she had. But he told himself, in that moment, he was anxious because he wanted to know if Richie was gonna hold money over Bev’s head, which was dicey in a way it wasn’t with Ben.

Richie, thirteen and cocky with his beer-bottle glasses, gave Eddie a condescending look, but there was something proud tucked in the corner of his mouth. “Of course not,” he said, which was how Eddie knew Richie had taken Bev on a date, and that was why he was mad that Ben came along.

And Richie’s bought Eddie a lot of stuff in the last week or so and hasn’t said anything about Eddie paying him back. This doesn’t mean anything, but Eddie’s brain gets stuck, sometimes, and this is so much more interesting to obsess about than the pasteurization of the milk products in this store.

“Uh,” Eddie says, staring down at his empty frozen yogurt cup. “Why?” he hears himself ask, and then fantasizes about being a martial artist in the prime of his life so he can roundhouse kick himself in the face.

Half of Richie’s face scrunches up, eye closing in something way more skeptical than a wink. “Uh, how often did you buy me ice cream when we were kids?” he says, like it’s obvious.

Oh. Oh, of course.

Relief and disappointment. Eddie covers both by snarling, “Because you were always blowing your money on bullshit like yo-yos you didn’t know how to—to—” What the fuck is the verb that goes with yo-yo?

“Yo?” Richie suggests drily.

“—and magician kits,” Eddie finishes.

“That magician kit was not bullshit, we got so much use out of that cauldron,” Richie says. He lifts his chin in the direction of the frozen yogurt dispensers. “Go on. I’ll lean over your shoulder and judge your choices.”

“You’re really selling this experience,” Eddie says.

He stands in front of the frozen yogurt options, watching Mike return to the table with his Dole Whip and cherries. He takes a seat at the table next to Stan and leans across to talk to him. Stan appears to be saving a seat for Patty. Bev stands at the counter and talks to the cashier, and the cashier turns and nods and starts doing something with a blender, and Ben goes to stand next to her. Their shoulders touch.

Eddie takes the brief reprieve to just stand by himself. He doesn’t feel lonely, exactly, not in a room with almost all of his closest friends, but he feels kind of overstimulated, which doesn’t bode well before he goes off on a food adventure. But he’s not so out of it, weighing the pros and cons of chocolate ice cream versus brownie batter frozen yogurt versus maybe he should try the chocolate peanut butter and the strawberry after all? There’s strawberry frozen yogurt. He notices Richie trying to sneak up behind him; his body is attuned to Richie like while he was in the hospital they installed a fucking radar.

“What do you want?” Richie whispers directly into his ear.

Eddie jerks, but it’s not out of surprise, it’s because Richie’s breathing on him. He glares at him and then sighs. “I don’t know. There are a lot of choices. Kind of want everything.”

Richie nods like this is reasonable and then proceeds toward the end of the display of soft serve dispensers. Eddie watches him go mechanically through the levers, putting just a blot of yogurt in the bowl, fussing with the cup as he pulls it away from the dispenser so that he gets a curling peak. Getting both brownie batter and chocolate is weird enough, but it’s not until he moves onto the pomegranate that Eddie caves and goes, “What are you doing?”

“Getting everything,” Richie replies without looking up, concentrating very hard on lemon frozen yogurt pouring into his cup of abominations.

“I— _Richie_.”

“Yes?”

“There are, like, a _lot_ of flavors here.”

“Thirty-three,” Richie replies, sounding happy about it.

“That’s—” Eddie grimaces. “How old are you? Are you a child? Are you playing with the soda machine at Burger King? You may not have it your way.”

“You said you wanted everything.”

He's trying to have it _Eddie’s way?_

“I can get my own ice cream.”

“Froyo.”

Eddie barely restrains himself from yelling _fuck you_ across the frozen yogurt shop. From the way that Richie turns to look back at him fuming and grins—that same fucking smug smile again—he’s pretty sure he gets the point across anyway.

“I’m not eating that,” Eddie announces.

“Okay,” Richie says indifferently.

“I’m getting my own yogurt.”

“Of course.”

Eddie watches him float over toward the coffee-flavored frozen yogurt and just cringes. This is gonna be a mess. “Don’t bother with the no sugar added or the nonfat or the low-fat ones, I’m supposed to be eating lots of calories.”

“Yes, my liege.” Richie continues his unspeakable work.

Eddie keeps watching and, when he moves to a new group of dispensers, says, “I just don’t want to waste it.”

“Anything you can’t finish, I’ll eat,” Richie says. “I will be your goat. Your garbage disposal.” He looks over his shoulder at Eddie again and jerks his head toward the wall of choices. “Go on, get what you want.”

At the table once everyone’s paid up, Bev looks at Richie’s towering monstrosity of frozen yogurt. Instead of horror—which is the look that Ben is still wearing—she looks more like Stan. Just disappointed.

“You better eat fast,” Stan says, visibly judging both Richie and Eddie.

This thing is going to be disgusting at the bottom. Just a melted swirl of, like, Oreo and pineapple and cotton candy.

Eddie has his strawberry and chocolate peanut butter, with his cookie dough pieces and the tapioca pearls. He understands now why they were labeled poppers. He feels almost appalled by the discovery, but he can’t stop eating them. He is kind of responsible for the thirty-dollar frozen yogurt, which is a dangerous leaning tower studded with gummy bears, something called unicorn bark, and “make sure you get some maraschino cherries. More maraschino cherries than that, come on,” as Eddie had commanded.

Richie is eating it. He’s using more table manners than Eddie has ever seen him employ in his life: carefully scraping tiny bits from the sides with his spoon. Eddie suspects he’s trying not to completely consume any particular flavor until Eddie gets a chance to try it, which makes him feel repulsed, guilty, and kind of swirly inside all at once.

“I don’t think you get to comment, since you didn’t even get froyo,” Richie says, lifting his chin in the direction of Beverly’s root beer float.

Bev loudly slurps from her float so that the straw gurgles, her eyes defiant. Ben’s expression of horror and revulsion dissolves into amusement.

“I know I said I was going all-out,” Mike says, something just sad in his voice. “…But I should have clarified I was doing that in, like, an adult way.”

“That looks really good,” Patty tells him. Eddie doesn’t know if being encouraging is a reflex, but Mike seems to accept it, looking plenty happy with his nondairy frozen dessert.

Stan is sitting there with a small sensible cup of vanilla in front of him on the table. He’s holding the insides of both wrists to the cup and seems to be making no effort to eat it, despite having added fruit and nuts to the top.

Eddie eats more strawberry poppers and catches Stan’s eye, then glances down to the cold pack he improvised, then looks back up.

“They’re so fucking itchy,” Stan groans, head sinking low in something like defeat.

Eddie sits up straight. “I know, right?”

“Do you remember when I had chickenpox? Sorry, do you remember when _Richie gave me chickenpox?”_

“You’re welcome,” Richie says.

“Yes,” Eddie says, because his mother had pulled him out of school for the week and placed him in quarantine, and he didn’t even _have_ it. He remembers sneaking out with Bill to go spy through Stan’s window and seeing him sitting in his room, looking dead-eyed and pale and speckled with blisters.

“This is worse,” Stan says. “It was easier not to scratch then.”

“You’re telling me,” Eddie says, gesturing at the _fucking hole in his chest_ with the hand not holding his frozen yogurt spoon. He’s afraid to even touch it, afraid he’ll scrape something and open up a blood vessel, afraid he’ll get another infection—and he _knows_ that while the itching means it’s healing, his body knitting itself back together, the parts of him that need healing are so deep down he could never satisfy that desire to scratch, he would never be able to reach.

Into the ensuing silence, Mike says slowly, “You know, guys, I’m really glad we can all bond like this. I’m really glad we found each other.”

Richie and Bev begin giggling. Ben cracks a smile.

Stan leans sideways into his wife. “Sorry.”

Patty is eyeing the Leaning Tower of Froyo speculatively. “Can I try it?” she asks.

Richie’s eyebrows shoot up and he glances automatically at Eddie, then turns back to her without waiting for a response. “Uh, yeah?” The obvious implication is _Can’t see why you’d want to_ , but Patty doesn’t seem to mind. She leans over and sinks a spoonful into the multicolored swirl, hooking a gummy bear and a piece of unicorn bark in the process.

Everyone actually leans toward her a little bit to watch her eat it. Mike actually leans across the space between their tables to get a good look at her face.

Patty chews the gummy bear, swallows, and then gives her verdict. “It’s not bad.”

“Not bad!” Eddie cheers, and clinks his frozen yogurt cup against hers.

Stan looks at Richie, betrayed. “This is what you do to people,” he says.

Richie pops a maraschino cherry into his mouth and nods solemnly.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Explanation: Eddie dreams about the leper, who walks into his hotel room, speaks to him in Eddie's voice, taunts him about his childhood fear of HIV/AIDS, and slowly transforms from the leper to Eddie himself, naked with his incisions clearly visible. Then it tries to climb in bed with him and Eddie panics. Richie accidentally wakes Eddie up and Eddie is able to lucid dream something more pleasant.
> 
> Thanks again to [qianwanshi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/qianwanshi/pseuds/qianwanshi) for looking over the parts I felt needed more horny energy (and isn't that a weird thing to type up after explaining all of the content issues); and to the 11 people on Twitter who suggested frozen yogurt flavors for my imaginary frozen yogurt shop in Bangor, because froyo flavors rotate seasonally and very rarely do people post their September menus in February. The cashier is, of course, me at my last food-service retail job.
> 
> UPDATE: ALSO ALSO ALSO [requirings](https://archiveofourown.org/users/requirings/pseuds/requirings) drew some [lovely illustrations of this fic](https://twitter.com/cytakigawa/status/1229999404322631680), featuring Eddie being sleepy in a hospital bed, Eddie vomiting into a kidney dish and yelling at Richie to get out, and Eddie wearing Richie's watch shirt. And they drew it without even seeing the reference for the shirt on Macy's. Go look at the pics now! Trigger warning for emetophobia, natch.


	8. Gears are Grinding

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Eddie doesn't feel well, goes on culinary adventures, and lashes out. Richie is complicated.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Write Eddie having a nice time," I said. "It'll be a nice emotional break," I said. And then _this_ happened.
> 
> BIG trigger warning for emetophobia this chapter, folks. You can skip from "the water pound like hail into the porcelain tub" to "'You want to lie down?'" Scene explanation in the endnotes.
> 
> Other content things: Eddie is definitely not feeling his best and as a result is a little grouchier and more combative than he might be otherwise. The inherent dangers of thinking alone at night; mentions of McCarthyism; hypochondria, intrusive thoughts, fear of leprosy, reference to the Yellowstone caldera AGAIN, mention of AIDS. You can never go back to childhood. Eddie works at a big insurance company. Despair. Pain. Use of opioid painkillers as prescribed by a physician, but mention of possible dependence. _Gone With the Wind_ , _The Wizard of Oz_. Richie is the picky eater for once. Eddie accidentally stomps on some of Richie's insecurities. _The Fellowship of the Ring._ TRIGGER WARNING FOR DISORDERED EATING, ORTHOREXIA. _A League of Their Own_ , _Monsters inside Me_.

The thing about taking two multi-hour naps in one day is that it takes Eddie’s tentative sleep schedule, curated by nurses hauling him bodily around a hospital ward eight times a day, and subjects it to a nuclear strike from orbit. Eddie wakes up when his electric blanket powers off on the timer—fire safety!—feeling pleasant and better rested than he has in a long time.

It’s one in the morning.

He sits up—lying on the blanket instead of under it was a successful experiment—and reaches out for his bottle of water. It is basically empty. He drains the rest of it and saves it for a recycling bin or something. Are there recycling bins in this hotel? There should be recycling bins in this hotel. It’s 2016.

He feels okay. Still wishes he could take a shower, but not bad. That same quiet not bad that he felt in the caverns, when he realized that all the feelings of dirt and filth and wrongness—it was never from inside him after all, it was external, it was skin deep, it wasn’t inside him—and he was fine all along. Now he’s greasy and kind of smelly and definitely itchy and he needs a shave—but his friends are here, and that was always the best he’d ever felt.

Maybe he shouldn’t be alone with his thoughts in this hotel room. It tends to get him in a bad way.

He definitely wants more water and he’s still working through a urinary tract infection on top of all his other problems, so he creeps out to the living area through the bathroom, like keeping close to the mini-fridge will make him less likely to wake Richie.

Richie snores, the hypocrite. Eddie keeps his eyes on target—fridge. Water. Sweet hydration—and does not allow himself to look over at Richie, but the fact that he finds the snoring kind of cute means he’s definitely too far gone. He tries to be subtle about the sudden electric roar of the fridge and its bright light, but Richie’s breathing doesn’t change its rhythm.

Eddie leans back against the kitchen counter, bare feet cold on the linoleum of the kitchenette, and drinks water.

Richie is a pale shape under the sheets of the sofa bed. He took two of the pillows from the bedroom and Eddie, in his button-down flannel pajamas, kind of figured that would be the last he would see him for the night. Eddie’s like, _reasonably sure_ that Richie wouldn’t sleep naked in a hotel suite he was sharing with someone else, but his back is to the door and to Eddie and the sheet is pulled down to like the middle of his back. He is definitely at least half-naked. Richie sleeps curled around the squashed pillow, shoulders hunched and rising like mountains from the sofa bed itself, white curve of his spine visible most of the way down. There’s not a lot of light here—Eddie’s still blinking the afterimage of the inside of the minifridge away—but Richie’s not just a little hairy, he’s _significantly_ hairy, and the palms of Eddie’s hands are like _if you petted him it would be rough and textured and probably tingle afterward, go on, do it_.

He doesn’t. He just holds the chilled water, condensation wet on his hands, and watches the gentle movement of Richie’s breathing. And listens to the not-so-gentle snuffling snores.

He goes back to bed before he starts to feel _really_ creepy—he can still hear Richie from behind the closed door—and he turns on the bedside light and flicks the electric blanket back on and lies on the bed, letting the heat soak into his bones. He grabs his phone and checks the time again—nearly quarter to two—and is just lazy for a little bit. At this hour, with no one else awake or needing anything from him, it feels deliciously indulgent.

He didn’t dream this time. That’s nice. He glances automatically to the carpet by the bedside as though to see the scraps and loose hair the leper left, but of course there’s nothing.

He didn’t dream about Richie either, and that’s good too. As far as he knows he’s never talked in his sleep, but that would be his luck. Richie would never let him hear the end of it if he somehow cottoned on that Eddie was dreaming about him. And the lucid dreaming—he has an idea that he should feel bad about that one, but it’s harmless imagination, and completely G-rated.

You know. Aside from the very presence of a gay person earning a higher rating from the, what, the film review board? Is that a thing? Or is he thinking about McCarthyism now? He’s pretty sure that there’s one board that does ratings for movies, and another board that used to watch movies and then arrest their directors for communist sympathies or _the homosexual agenda_.

Anyway, his sleep and dreaming are weird now, which should not surprise him considering the opioid painkillers he was prescribed. He has a vague idea that he’s following in a long line of medical tradition. He thinks a little about that horrifying scene in _Gone with the Wind_ where the soldier is screaming for the doctors not to cut off his gangrenous leg and thinks, _Boy, if that guy had a little of this stuff…_

So that’s the mood he’s in, as he opens up the Wikipedia app on his phone. A little hazy and unnerved, pretty warm and comfortable, with Richie providing white noise in the next room. Out to answer the all-important question: _What did thirteen-year-old me know about leprosy?_

He suspects the answer isn’t much. And more stuff wrong than he got right.

His wander through Wikipedia tells him his assessment was basically correct: there’s all kinds of things that Eddie just made up out of thirteen-year-old anxiety. The way the eyes shifted; the cheekbone collapsed. The straining tight skin. That’s not leprosy. Eddie remembers it in the way that the worst things that ever happen to you stay in your mind, where good things fade or get written over. That’s what happens when you shy away from the mental image.

This time Eddie grabs it by the throat and stares it down. Puckered absence of a nose. Missing upper lip, twisted lower hanging open with a thread of drool.

Leprosy is just a bacterial infection. A long term one, causing nerve damage—Eddie’s right hand spasms closed and then open again where it lies next to him on the mattress—and eventual analgesia. And if you can’t feel your hands and you injure them, you might not notice. You might lose fingers when the wounds get infected and you _don’t know_ , your eyesight’s degrading, you can’t read the flavors for the frozen yogurt in the shop—

Eddie closes his phone entirely and takes some deep breaths. He lets his phone thump onto the nightstand and pulls his right hand up in front of his face, turning it over and around. No scratches, no swelling. He uses the fingernails on his left hand to pinch at his right hand, squeezing the pads of his fingertips, making sure he _feels it_.

His hand is cold. When he makes a fist it feels weak— _muscle weakness_ —but he can feel the little cold points where his fingers touch his palm. He didn’t realize that there was a heat difference between his palm and his fingers, but it makes sense, the surface area of skin related to heat loss and—

Richie’s gone quiet in the next room. Eddie hears him say something indistinct, and then nothing.

“Richie?” Eddie asks. He doesn’t raise his voice. Says it like he might if Richie were… across the room.

If Richie were on the other side of the bed, Eddie would whisper it.

Richie says nothing, because he doesn’t hear, because he’s asleep in the next room.

Eddie rolls onto his side and tucks his cold hand under his pillow so that the heat of the electric blanket will soak into it. He can feel it. He would notice if it got hurt.

He tries to tell himself to sleep but, as per usual, his body doesn’t want to listen to his commands. So he just lies there, staring at the ceiling, listening for Richie’s snoring to start up again.

_You don’t have leprosy, dumbass._

_You don’t have leprosy._

_You don’t have leprosy._

“You don’t have leprosy,” Eddie mutters to himself, and picks up his phone again.

_The incubation period of the disease, on average, is five years. Symptoms may occur within one year but can also take as long as twenty years or even more to occur._

He puts the phone down again and gets up from the bed. It is a more athletic endeavor than he’s proud of. He gets up on the left side of the bed and paces around to the window, bracing himself on the TV unit as he goes, making it wobble dangerously, pausing to stop and wonder if he’s about to knock over this TV in this hotel room registered under Richie’s name, because on one hand that would be _extremely fucking funny_ and on the other hand _kill him._

_And if you do have leprosy—so what? You’re asymptomatic. You have some bigger problems. It might not even be a problem for the next twenty years. You could be sixty and someone would say, “Hey, Edward, we’ve noticed that you have leprosy, would you like some multidrug therapy for that?” And you’ll be sixty years old and you’ll sit back in your armchair—the government assigns you an armchair when you turn sixty—and you’ll say, “Nah, not really, because even if you cured me I would just do the same thing I’ve done for the whole rest of my life, which is fuckall.”_

Eddie pauses on his quest to peer out the curtains at nighttime Bangor.

That got dark pretty fast.

He doesn’t have leprosy. He’s got a hole punched through his chest and some broken ribs and a number of incisions and definite nerve damage in his right arm, and probably an untreated panic disorder, and a prescription for opioid painkillers that might result in dependence based on his history with medication, but probably not considering how jazzed he’s been about experiencing pain lately. He doesn’t have leprosy.

Why the fuck was he so afraid of leprosy as a kid?

_It wasn’t leprosy you were afraid of, it was AIDS._

Yeah, but why?

There are bright lights in the parking lot, shining down on all the cars. Eddie can see Mike’s truck, and if he squints maybe he can imagine a shape in the back of Ben’s car that might be Silver.

When they met up at the Jade of the Orient, Bev said, “Eddie, tell me you became a doctor,” but Eddie never did anything with all his fear of disease. He never set himself to fighting it. Instead he told himself that he harnessed all his fear, that he made it useful, that he enabled himself and others to look at the world logically and calculate the likelihood of bad things happening. Maybe if he’d sat down with the Merck manual or _The Hot Zone_ or decided he wanted to dedicate his life to stopping the spread of infectious disease, things would have been different. Maybe he’d walk in like Bill did, secure in the knowledge that he was at the top of his field and wildly successful by any metric. Bill’s one of the best-selling authors in the world. Bill’s married to a literal movie star.

Bill was, like the rest of them, desperately unhappy.

He remembers that the electric blanket is still on and that it’s a hazard, especially when no one is using it, so he creeps over to the bed again slowly and fumbles for the switch to turn it off.

His mother never would have paid for medical school. Eddie would have had to do premed at a state school, probably, to qualify for scholarships, and then he would have had to fight tooth and nail to get into med school, and his mother would have had a fit at the time he spent studying and doing his medical internship and the system of being placed at hospitals—any hospital! Anywhere in the country! He could have gone anywhere! He could have left her.

And then when he became a doctor—let’s say one that specialized in infectious disease—

He covers his face with his hands.

Travel medicine, tropical medicine. Diagnostics. Patients with HIV and other immunodeficiencies. People who needed him. People Eddie could have put his needs aside for and stood up for and been brave for—it was always _so much easier to be brave_ when someone else needed him, when Richie was in the deadlights and nobody else was gonna get him out, when they were all lost and they needed a guide, when the onus wasn’t on him and his limitations and his fears. _I’m doing the fucking Mashed Potatoes all over It and I’ve got a broken arm!_ He could have been so much more than he was.

He gets up and walks back to the window. Beyond the light pollution of the city—not so strong in Bangor as it is in New York, obviously—it is a clear black night. He feels like there ought to be rain, some kind of condensation so that he can press his hand to the glass and watch it fog around his fingers. But nature is a higher power and has never given a shit about what Eddie Kaspbrak wants.

And instead of being somebody who does something for others, who makes a difference in the world, who makes other people feel better—Eddie gives corporations a chance to shut needy people down. Eddie warns them off bad investments. Eddie’s a form of regulation in a chaotic world, a logical perspective that looks past emotional influence, it’s Eddie’s _job_ to put aside sentiment and be the bigger person, Eddie has a suit and a tie and a big manly car and a wife in an apartment and Eddie’s an _adult_ now, this is part of growing up—

Is he crying?

Instead of tears he feels a flush of heat in his nose and his sinuses and he presses his hand to the bridge, a little astonished. He’s not crying but he could, if he let himself.

_Go on. Go out there. Shake Richie awake and sit down on the edge of the sofa bed and tell him ‘I hate my life and my job and myself and I want to change things, I want to go back in time, I want to do better, I want to have meaning, I want to be a better person than I am, I want to feel good about being alive.’_

_Watch Richie staring back at you, sleep-fuzzy and confused and completely unable to see without his glasses on. And at least half-naked. And say, ‘Eds, what the fuck are you talking about?’_

Because what does Eddie think he’s going to do in Bangor at—he checks the clock on the nightstand again—two-thirty in the morning, with a nice big ventilation gap cut into his torso and his ribs a set of busted windchimes and none of his own money?

He puts his forehead against the window. While it doesn’t oblige with the condensation, it is blissfully cold.

_I don’t have leprosy._

_And what if I did?_

_And maybe the Yellowstone caldera will erupt tomorrow and none of this will matter anyway._

But Eddie actually died. Not only did he live forty years of his life emotionally unfulfilled by everything he became, he _died_ unhappy. And he doesn’t want to do it again.

“I’m gonna do something,” he tells himself, under his breath. “I’m gonna do something.”

* * *

So of course, in the morning, he can’t get up.

It’s an embarrassing realization. He goes to sit up on his elbows and his head reels and he thinks he’s going to black out, so he relaxes his muscles and gives himself a few minutes to recover from the headrush. Sometimes that happens. Eddie’s a man of a certain age, he’s definitely dehydrated, and sometimes a little bit of adjustment happening in the morning is normal.

So he lies awake on his pillow for a little bit, gradually feeling his pulse sink into the rest of his body all the way down to his toes. It makes him feel a little bit better about his circulation problems, makes him feel like the rest of his body is all on his team for once.

And he rolls onto his side and lifts his head and the room spins and he is forced to put his head back down.

He goes to take a deep breath but the pain is like getting punched in the back. It almost knocks the breath out of him again. He lets it out in a short little sigh, reaches for his water bottle, and takes a few sips to steady himself. Little sips, as Sarah would tell him. Then he sits up.

Every muscle from his neck down to his waist aches. He reaches up and puts the big joint of his thumb into his trapezius at the side of his neck. It’s hard as cable wire. In fact, his whole musculoskeletal system feels like that, like it could come through his skin at any moment.

“What the fuck,” he moans, pushing his knuckles in hard, and then he remembers Richie.

Richie is apparently lying in wait or something in the next room, because the next thing Eddie hears is him calling, “Eddie?”

Please no. Please no.

“Yeah?” Eddie manages.

“You up?”

“No, stupid, I’m in a REM cycle right now.” Then he grimaces at himself. That was a reflex. And bad temper. There’s no reason to snap at Richie first thing in the morning, Richie hasn’t even done anything, it’s all Eddie’s problem.

He hears footsteps outside the bedroom door and—

“Don’t come in!” he says hurriedly.

The footsteps stop. Eddie imagines he can see little shadows of Richie standing on the other side of the door.

There’s a moment of quiet and then Richie asks, “You jerking off?”

“No, dickwad,” Eddie says, floundering around for the shirt to his pajama set. He took it off when he lay down on the electric blanket, knowing that fully-dressed he would just start sweating. He finds it, gets his arm through one sleeve, and realizes it’s inside-out. His arms protest at being made to operate at this level of panic so early in the morning. “I’m naked. Don’t come in.”

“Hot,” Richie says through the door, impossible to tell if he’s being sarcastic or not.

Which he has to be. Right?

_But what if he’s not?_

Eddie stills in the process of turning his shirt right-side out and looks around as though for a camera. Is he being punked?

“So Stan and Patty are getting ready to leave for the airport but they wanted to see you before they go. I was gonna wake you up in like half an hour if you didn’t on your own.”

“Hang on,” Eddie says, because he’s a grown-ass man and he’s not going to have this whole conversation through the door. He gets his arms through his pajama sleeves, gasps a little as he pulls the shirt up over his shoulders because _ouch_ , and swears to himself as he tries to rapidly do buttons with his clumsy fingers. Once he’s decent he says, “Okay, you can come in.”

“Nobody gets in to see the wizard! Not nobody, not no how!” Richie says, because he’s Richie, and then he twists the doorknob and the door opens.

Eddie realizes his mistake almost immediately.

Richie just kind of leans there in the doorway, looking like a college kid. His hair is sleep-ruffled and fluffy, his eyes are bleary behind his massive glasses, and he’s wearing a t-shirt and boxers. They’re patterned with tacos and hot sauce, because of fucking course they are. He looks—and Eddie hates himself for thinking this—fucking adorable. It’s despicable. Richie’s a forty-year-old man. Eddie is almost certain he hasn’t brushed his teeth yet, but there he is, holding one of the hotel-provided mugs and letting the smell of coffee into the room.

And Eddie is on a bed. He might be dressed in his blue-and-white pinstriped armor again, but he’s definitely on a bed, and he definitely feels vulnerable.

“Oh my god,” Richie says slowly, staring back at him, and Eddie has the horrible irrational fear that Richie has suddenly gained the ability to read minds. But then Richie just says, “What are you wearing?”

Eddie looks down at himself. There’s nothing wrong with his pajamas. They’re sensible and warm and not made out of any ridiculous material. It’s not like Eddie brought a set of monogrammed silk pajamas when he had the vague idea he was going to die in Derry.

Which he did, apparently, though it still doesn’t feel real. How odd that Eddie has the satisfaction of being right and none of the ability to enjoy it.

“Pajamas,” he replies, helpfully pointing out the blindingly obvious. “What the fuck are _you_ wearing?”

Richie ignores the question and puts his free hand over his mouth. “Did they not come in the feetie pajamas version? With the butt flap in the back? Is there a little hood you can pull up over your head and just _coze_ in?”

How the fuck does he manage to make _coze_ sound lascivious? The tacos and hot sauce bottles have faces. They appear to be flirting with each other; little hearts sitting between the pairs. Eddie’s not looking.

Eddie blinks at him and settles into a glare. “You know what really drives me insane?”

“Thirty-percent off linens and whites sales at Macy’s?” Richie suggests, sipping his coffee.

“That you are a man who is medically permitted to take a shower. And you still insist on looking like that.”

Richie grins, sudden, startling. “Oh, rush me to the burn unit, Dr. K, that’s some _hot stuff_.” He sips his coffee again. “Do you need to borrow anything? Shirt? Social Security card? Jockstrap?”

Eddie stares at him, not thinking about jockstraps _at all_ , before he says, “Tell me you don’t carry your social security card around with you, that’s way harder to replace than anything else in your wallet if it gets stolen.”

“Man, I don’t even know where my social security card is,” Richie says. “Are you getting up or are you napping for half an hour before the Stanley and Patricia Uris Goodbye Tour?”

Right. Because Eddie’s on a bed. He could just… lie back down. Richie could look at him, from the doorway, while he lay prone on a bed. Which he’s done before, but this time Richie would be _aware_ that Eddie’s looking back at him, and…

He takes a deep breath and says, “I need my painkillers. And a shirt. And I’m gonna lie down for half an hour.”

“’Kay,” Richie says indifferently. “You need more water?”

More water would be helpful when Eddie’s fighting the urge to vomit up all his pills. He nods a little vaguely, kind of surprised that Richie offered.

“Cool,” Richie says. “After that I’m gonna take a shower, because someone destroyed my self-image, so take a piss while you can. And there’re bagels, if you want them. And little travel tubes of cream cheese, it’s fucking gross.”

He turns away from the door. They made the exchange of suitcases last night, Richie dragging Eddie’s suitcases into the bedroom as he dragged his out to rest beside the couch. Eddie watches his back as he goes, knowing for a fact that Richie did not sleep with a shirt on last night. It was dark, but his eyesight’s not that bad.

He hobbles through the Jack and Jill to the wetroom and grits his teeth while he uses the toilet. He hopes his urinary tract infection is mostly gone, but he’s still got a course of antibiotics to finish, because when people don’t finish their antibiotics you get antibiotic-resistant superbug urinary tract infections and technically Eddie has already _had_ one of those. So he’s going to choke down the pills. He tells himself this sternly in a mental voice that is _definitely_ his own, neither Sonia Kaspbrak’s _nor_ a dream leper’s.

Richie appears in the wetroom while Eddie is slowly and agonizingly washing his hands. “Okay, I’m gonna—you okay?”

Eddie looks up and makes eye contact with Richie in the mirror. Richie looks spooked, his lips pulled back from his teeth in kind of scare-grimace. Eddie lets himself look at his own reflection.

He’s pale as fuck, he’s still broken out all over his face so he’s bright white with irregular red splotches, and there so many bags under his eyes he can shop reusable at Whole Foods without guilt. And half of his face is swallowed by his truly terrible beard, which he needs to shave, but he can’t do because he has limited functionality of his right hand and a new deep suspicion of shiny objects.

And he’s in a lot of pain.

“I’m gonna lie down,” Eddie says. “Wake me up in half an hour.”

“Okay,” Richie says, looking dubious. “The, uh, meds and stuff are next to your bed, the shirt’s laid out. If you need longer, man, I’m sure that’s okay.”

“Half an hour,” Eddie says. “I want to see Stan.”

And if he still feels like this in half an hour, once the painkillers are working their way through his system—he’s gonna have to cave and make Richie take him back to the hospital.

* * *

Half an hour later the entire world is looking much better. Eddie’s body has been drugged into submission, and he’s kneading idly into his neck and shoulders with the knuckle of his left hand. He didn’t realize until he put the shirt on that the swirling green pattern is not abstract feathering, it is a bunch of very small lizards layered overtop one another.

“What makes the cream cheeses gross?” he asks.

Richie’s hair is still wet from the shower. He’s wearing a dark gray t-shirt under a blue button-down patterned with small turtles, and he absolutely didn’t dry himself off properly when he dressed because there are small patches of wet where the fabric touches his skin. And he smells like hotel shower products, all of which seem to be variations on the same almond theme, which means Eddie’s kind of taking deep breaths to catch the sweet smell layered on top of the warm dark animal scent that is _Richie._

At least Eddie realizes he’s high this time.

“Because it’s in a tube, man, come on,” Richie says, which seems like an arbitrary complaint about a fermented semisolid dairy product. “I’ll take you down to the hotel restaurant if you want, like, real food, they have omelets and shit.”

Eddie is not getting in that elevator until he has to. “Tubes are gross?”

One of Richie’s hands comes up and brushes over his hair, checking if it’s dry. Richie needs a haircut. The length is okay, but it’s getting straggly on the ends, and Eddie’s sure it would be healthier if Richie would just take care of it a little better. It’s not that far from the curls he had when they were in school, once he grew out of that bowl cut.

“Are you eating a bagel?” Richie asks.

Eddie might. He wants to see why tubed cream cheese is gross first.

Richie leans down on the other side of the table and picks up a tube of cream cheese. He holds it up between them. “Okay. Watch closely now.”

He waggles the fingers of his other hand over it like he’s nine and showing off his Intro to Magic kit. Eddie leans in a little closer to look. Richie pinches the packaging where it’s indicated. He has nice fingernails, Eddie thinks stupidly, watching them. Trimmed carefully close, far neater than Eddie ever remembers seeing them when they were kids. There’s a hangnail threatening just under the nailbed on his thumb, though. Eddie feels inexplicably put out by that, as if a hangnail is something he could defend Richie from.

“Presto change-o,” Richie says, and when he tears open the packet of cream cheese a little pale liquid dribbles out of the grey plastic.

Eddie stares at the cream cheese and then back up at him. “That’s it?” he asks, but memories are coming back—Richie pulling faces over an open jar of peanut butter at the Tozier house, gagging as he stirred it with a knife. Eddie finds himself grinning almost accidentally. “You’re forty years old and you still can’t stand oil in your condiments?”

“It’s in a tube! You can’t mix it back in!”

Eddie grins wider. “You’re a big baby.”

Richie opens his mouth in a caricature of offense. “ _I’m_ a big baby?” he demands. “How many naps did you take yesterday, big man?”

“I’m drugged!”

“We bought you a blankie.”

It’s a really nice blanket. Eddie is very satisfied and far prefers it to the hotel bedspread. He leans down at the table and presses harder at the other side of his neck.

Richie’s voice is soft when he asks, “You okay, man?”

Eddie takes a deep breath and admits, quietly, “I’m in pain.”

“Okay,” Richie says. He drops the cream cheese on the table because at this point neither of them knows why he’s holding it, but he looks at Eddie like he doesn’t know what to do. “Are your meds helping at all?”

“Yes,” Eddie says.

He might be having a little bit of a fantasy right now, thanks to Richie’s blatant scalp massage in the hospital, about Richie nudging Eddie’s hands aside and sinking his own knuckles into Eddie’s shoulders. But Eddie’s pretty sure he would make some graphic noises if that happened and he’s not gonna put himself in that situation.

He remembers though. How good it felt. How his brain shut down and just focused on that, and nothing else. It felt like meditation of some sort—the mindfulness the office mental health point people (which is a stupid thing to have in an office, as if Eddie wants to tell Kim from marketing about his problems) were always pitching at the annual regional conference.

“What do you need?” Richie asks. “We’re gonna meet Stan in the lobby, if that works. We can go get basically whatever.”

Eddie considers, then decides, “Bagel,” and reaches for the gross tube of cream cheese.

* * *

He’s eating the bagel when Stan and Patty come into the lobby with their luggage. He doesn’t get up from his armchair—he’s trying to save that until he has to—but they both smile at him as they make their rounds of the Losers. Patty’s almost a full foot shorter than Mike but she hugs him with enthusiasm, and that’s fun to watch, her just vanishing into Mike.

“How’d everyone sleep?” Stan asks. He looks tired and slightly rumpled, his curls thick and wild. His shirt is wrinkled. It’s not the Stanley Uris that Eddie ever expected to see grow up—if he ever thought about what they’d look like as adults, which he can’t say he did beyond that one conversation with Beverly before the Oath—but Eddie’s a little relieved that Stan’s not so unbending and rigid now. He’s glad he has that.

“Captain Eds has had one nap today already,” Richie reports, because he’s an asshole.

“Richie’s afraid of cream cheese,” Eddie announces.

That gets more funny looks than Richie’s comment, for obvious reasons, so Eddie feels triumphant as Richie hurriedly explains about oil and how packaging prevents stirring, scowling at Eddie the whole time.

Patty looks at Eddie eating and makes a small sound of dismay. “Oh, Eddie. I thought you’d be on my side about the bagels?”

Eddie blinks at her.

“Aside from my parents, that’s what I miss most about New York,” Patty says mournfully.

Eddie remembers their one-percent-bagel conversation in the hospital. “I don’t know any better. I’ve never enjoyed food before,” he says honestly.

Ben seems to visibly twitch, his eyebrows hiking up as he looks around at Eddie, but he averts his gaze almost immediately.

“He can start with Maine bagels and work his way up,” Stan suggests to Patty.

Mike clears his throat.

Everyone remembers that Mike has never left the state of Maine.

“And Mike!” Patty says hurriedly. “You’re going to see all kinds of amazing things! Would you send us postcards? Stanley, did you give them our address?”

Stan grimaces. “I can text it.”

Patty frowns a little, apparently confused.

Mike says, “I have it, don’t worry. I can definitely send you postcards.”

“That’s because Mike’s a stalker,” Richie stage-whispers.

“Oh, Richie, your Google alerts are never boring,” Mike replies.

Despite this obviously being a joke, Richie makes a show of preening, combing his fingers through the hair at the back of his head a little fussily, which makes Bev laugh and Eddie quickly look down at his bagel so he doesn’t stare.

“And you have to come visit if you come to Georgia,” Patty insists, and then looks around at Bev and Ben. “You too.”

“Maybe,” Bev says, hugging Patty in turn. Patty is a full four inches taller than her. “We haven’t decided our route yet. I think we’re going to kind of play it by ear?” She looks around at Ben as though for confirmation. Ben smiles and shrugs.

Eddie glances at Richie and finds that something odd is happening with him and Stan. While the others talk, Richie has Stan half-folded into a hug, but Stan is looking up at him with an extremely familiar expression: _what the fuck did you just say, Trashmouth?_ , a key emotion for anyone acquainted with Richie. On Stan it’s wide-eyed and exasperated and somewhat furious, and he looks thirteen years old again. It’s pleasantly nostalgic.

It’s Richie who’s breaking the script. Instead of being gleeful about getting a reaction out of Stan, he looks like he’d like the floor to open up and swallow him whole. He glances at Eddie out of the corner of his eye, averts his gaze immediately when he sees Eddie staring back, and then leans down a little to whisper in Stan’s ear.

Annoyed at being left out and suspicious that they might be discussing him right in front of him, Eddie asks at full volume, “What’re you guys talking about?”

Patty, Mike, Bev, and Ben all turn around to look at them. This was Eddie’s desired effect, but Richie goes rigid and Stan releases him, still glaring.

“Gossiping about B-b-big B-b-bill,” Richie lies. Eddie can tell. Richie wouldn’t be embarrassed to be caught talking about Bill, and Stan wouldn’t look half-irate about it.

“Oh really?” Eddie asks. “What about?”

Stan folds his arms over his chest and looks back at Richie. “Yeah, Trashmouth,” he says. “Share with the class.”

“I don’t have to do anything unless she tells me,” Richie says, pointing at Patty.

Patty is frowning, an odd look on her face. After a long pause, she says slowly, “I don’t understand why you call him that.” There’s a strange pressing tone in her voice.

“It’s because he swore so much as a kid,” Stan says. “Using all the dirty words, saying just bad jokes. Trashmouth.”

“No, not you,” Patty says, and folds her arms over her chest. Stan starts smiling. “You, Richie.”

Richie blinks several times, looking like he’s trying and failing to reset correctly. “Big Bill?” he asks. “Maybe you’d have had to see him back in the day, but it only got ironic once he never broke five-eight—”

“That’s not how you said it,” Patty interrupts. She shifts her weight and Stan’s expression relaxes suddenly, glare just evaporating and being replaced by a kind of shocked and gleeful open-mouthed smile.

Richie looks blank and then says, “Oh, the stutter?”

“Yes,” Patty says. “Do you always talk about him behind his back like that?”

_Yeah, Richie, do you always talk about him behind his back like that?_

Eddie finds himself mirroring Stan’s expression as Richie, forty years old, gets chewed out by the teacher.

“Sometimes I say it to his face, too,” Richie offers, unfazed.

“Hmm,” Patty says. It’s a tiny sound. It conveys _fathoms_ of how unimpressed she is. “Do you always make fun of people with speech impediments?”

“I—” Richie blinks again and produces a string of incoherent gibberish that ends in him looking to Stan for help. Stan grins wider and shakes his head, leaving Richie to drown.

“Oh my god, Patty,” Bev says, and lays her hand on Patty’s shoulder. Patty looks around at her, expression softening. “It is time to induct you into the Losers Club with the sacred words.”

Patty’s disapproving posture drops at once and she looks bemused. “Okay.”

Eddie watches, feeling darkly satisfied, as Ben and Mike, “Beep beep, Richie!”

Richie looks at the floor with a thousand-yard stare. “Am I being bullied?” he asks very softly.

Patty hugs Eddie too, telling him not to get up as he moves to rise from his chair and pressing her cheek to his. “And you have to come to visit too,” she tells him seriously, hands on Eddie’s shoulders. “Promise?”

Eddie feels a little bit trapped in the chair with Patty pinning him like that. “Uh, promise,” he manages. Her hands are very warm. He’s cold again. “Thank you for, uh.” _For giving Stan back. For accepting that we’re his friends and not turning us away._ “Listening,” he manages.

Patty’s expression shifts a little. Eddie is reminded—oddly, considering she’s standing right next to her in this little semicircle in the lobby—of Bev. Bev determined. Bev pulling back the cup on a slingshot with certainty in her eyes.

“Thank you,” she says in an undertone. “For him.”

Stan also leans down to hug Eddie goodbye, but there’s a faint threat in his face. “We’re gonna talk,” he says to Eddie.

“Okay?” Eddie asks, not sure what there is to talk about exactly.

“I love you,” Stan says in the exact same tone.

“I love you too?” Eddie says, wondering why Stan sounds like he’d like to beat him up.

Stan grabs either side of Eddie’s head and stamps his greasy hair with a kiss.

Eddie cringes. “Noooo, I’m not allowed to shower until tomorrow, don’t smell me.”

Stan points a finger at Eddie and gives him a ferocious look. Then the Urises leave the hotel.

* * *

The remaining Losers have breakfast at the hotel restaurant. Richie has a second cup of coffee while Eddie scowls at the menu.

“Do you want tea or anything, Eddie?” Bev asks.

Eddie hates tea. He’s never thought about it until now, but he hates it. “Not allowed,” he says instead. “Dehydrating.”

“But you’re supposed to be packing in the calories?” Mike asks, as though checking to make sure.

Eddie nods.

“How about hot chocolate?” Mike suggests.

There’s a heartbeat where Eddie just processes the possibility, and then he sits up straight and nods ferociously. Bev laughs, Ben gives a quiet smile, and Richie—surprisingly—doesn’t say anything to tease, just watches with unveiled amusement, like he’s in a joke that Eddie doesn’t know.

It’s kind of irritating, actually. Like a little grain of sand, just sitting there, grating. A six-foot-one grain of sand.

Eddie is definitely still stoned when the waiter comes by, and he gets a little lost watching people put in their orders, not really understanding that the waiter is looking at him expectantly until Mike goes ahead and orders two hot chocolates.

“Do you want whipped cream?” the waiter asks.

“You know we want whipped cream,” Mike says, as Eddie nods.

“Do you want the hot chocolates extra hot?”

Eddie, shivering, has never loved anybody the way he loves this waiter.

That’s all he orders. Ben keeps giving him anxious glances as Eddie sits there and slowly melts into his hot chocolate, but Eddie doesn’t really mind. Nobody’s pressuring him to order something he can’t eat right now. At one point the table goes silent and he looks up to find everyone looking at him with various amused expressions. Richie is full-on smirking.

“Hmm?” Eddie asks.

Richie’s mouth works a little, lip twitching. “Good hot chocolate?” he asks.

Eddie squints at him. “Why are you being…?” he starts, then frowns deeper trying to come up with the word.

Richie’s face changes. Goes blank, all of a sudden, like he’s turned off his whole personality. Suddenly there’s a complete stranger staring at Eddie from the other side of the table. Big guy, solemn eyes behind the guard of glasses, his mouth a flat line. “Being what?” he says, voice several notes lower than normal.

Nobody says anything. Bev, in the middle of cutting triangles out of her omelet, sets her fork down.

Eddie has no idea what the fuck just happened.

Then Richie smiles. It’s neither a nice smile nor a threatening smile, but at least it’s recognizable as _his_. “Being what?” he repeats on a rising note, his voice gentler.

Feeling out of his depth, Eddie winds three fingers of his right hand through the handle on the mug. They’re all that will fit through this tiny loop. The heat through the ceramic warms his knuckles.

“So _suspicious_ ,” he says, mulish, aware he’s being sulky and childish and hating it.

There’s a moment while they all process that. Mike exhales slowly and the steam from his mug billows around his face.

And then Richie’s back, grinning a Richie smile and eating his home fries with maple syrup like an animal. “Suspicious?” he says, his voice innocent in a way that means he wants Eddie to know he’s up to something. “Why, whatever are you talking about, Eddie my love?” His open vowels tend toward the Southern, like he’s about to burst into an _I do declare_.

Eddie’s mouth is thick with chocolate and froth from the whipped cream. He should have ordered water too, just to clear it. He’s sure that his words will come out slow.

“You’re like at the lunch table in high school again,” he complains. “Whispering with Stan and when I catch you at it you’re just like—” He beams in his best impression of an adolescent Richie Tozier, chin lifted and teeth bared. “‘ _Your hair looks nice, Eds!_ ’”

Richie’s reaction is over the top, but in a Richie way instead of a performative way. He laughs so hard he snorts, which they always made fun of him for in high school, so Eddie sincerely doubts it’s on purpose. “Is that me?” he manages. “Was that me? Did you just—”

“You’re just taking hits left and right on impressions,” Mike observes. “First Stan, now Eddie.”

“I know, fuck me, right?” Richie says. He drinks from his water. There’s a flush on his face. Eddie watches the ice cubes collide with each other in the glass, hears the little atonal clinks. Richie gulps and sets the glass back down, and there’s a little ring of condensation on the table.

Eddie looks up from the tabletop to see Ben watching him. Part of him that feels uncomfortably caught—though doing what, Eddie doesn’t know—wants to snap back with the _what are you looking at_? But it’s slowed by mixed pharmaceutical intervention and hot chocolate with whipped cream. He feels like a kid on a snow day or something. Instead Eddie meets Ben’s gaze and tilts his head to the side, wordless inquisition.

“Pretty accurate,” Bev offers. She’s not wearing makeup; her eyelids are lavender and pink with tiredness. She looks the kind of soft that Richie does without his glasses.

Eddie has never had brunch with his friends before. It feels incredibly indulgent all at once.

“Well, before I was baselessly maligned,” Richie says, playing faux-wounded, “I was planning our itinerary. So if I look _suspicious_ , Eds, it’s only because you’re not used to what I look like when the gears are grinding.” He waggles an index finger toward his own ear, indicating the mechanisms of his mind.

Eddie squints at him again. “What did Stan say?”

Richie’s eyebrows go flat, annoyed, though Eddie can’t quite tell if it’s with him or with Stan. “Stan was asking me please not to steal his wife away, it can be so difficult at his age with a dick like—” Richie makes an obscene gesture with his thumb. “—to find anyone—”

“Okay, okay.” Ben reaches out, puts a hand over Richie’s, and pushes it down to the table. “The man’s not here to defend himself.”

Eddie considers for long moments before he settles on a reference that pleases him. He raises his hot chocolate to his mouth with both hands. “Fine, then. Keep your secrets.”

Instead of responding to the joke—which Eddie _knows_ he gets, Richie’s still a big honking nerd—Richie just sighs a little and says, “I was going to go meet your drug dealer—”

“Are you talking about the pharmacy?” Eddie interrupts, resigned.

“—and see if either of your scrips are ready. But I think in order to fully embrace my new suspicious aura I’m also gonna commit some white-collar crime and maybe some unethical journalism practices. I’ll decide on the way. Do you want anything from the drugstore?”

But he doesn’t ask Eddie if he wants to come with him. Eddie’s not sure what he would answer if given the option. On one hand, he’s not moving any faster today than he was yesterday, and technically he feels worse. On the other hand, he doesn’t _want_ to be confined to the hotel.

 _Where are you?_ Eddie thinks clearly. _Come back._

_Kiss me, I’m sweet._

“No,” he says instead. “I’m okay.”

Richie gives him the bored expression, eyelids half-shuttered, looking about ten seconds away from death. It reminds Eddie forcibly that there’s no point in even approaching politeness with Richie. It’s a foreign language to him.

And on the off chance that Eddie’s prescriptions are ready today instead of tomorrow, they could be on the road soon. Eddie could wake up in the morning and take a shower and then get in the car and drive away from Maine and—not _never_ come back, but he’ll get a three-week reprieve before his follow-up.

“Okay,” Eddie says, trying to think through his cloudy head. He squints one eye shut, trying to force a level of focus that will make his higher thinking come online. “Motion sickness meds.”

“Are you still having the ear—”

“Yes,” Eddie says.

“Ear?” Mike asks.

“There’s fluid in my ear,” Eddie says, because that’s not an illness, that’s simply a location problem. Eddie cannot remember ever getting lost in his life, so he doesn’t have a lot of patience for his body parts doing so. If a liver cell migrated up to his stomach and started trying to grow a new liver there, he would be equally irritated.

Ben frowns. “I’ve had that. Don’t you have to get that dried up with meds?”

Richie switches gears, head turning as stiffly as an automaton. “How’d you get that?” he demands.

Ben responds to the interrogation with typical Ben Hanscom nonchalance. “Airplane. Back in like 2005. I kept getting woozy on elevators and in cars.”

“I’m not woozy,” Eddie says, but he doesn’t clarify that it means he almost spat up a bagel in the elevator on the way down to the lobby this morning.

Richie fixes Eddie with a stare. “Was it happening before the whole—” He waves a hand to indicate _It and everything after_.

How’s Eddie supposed to know? He was drunk most of the time he was here, which means that he was hungover for the rest of it. Everything wrong with him he kind of chalked up to drug and alcohol interactions.

“You were pretty sick in the car on the way to the frozen yogurt shop,” Bev reminds him.

“I wasn’t sick,” Eddie snaps.

Everyone goes quiet. Bev’s eyebrows lift. Ben turns from Richie to Eddie and blinks slowly. It’s all the worse because there’s no reproach in his gaze, but Eddie can feel it.

“Sorry,” Eddie says. He shakes his head. “Sorry, it’s not—”

“I get it,” Bev replies.

“I don’t—I didn’t mean.”

“I,” Bev repeats, her voice a little more insistent, “get it.”

Richie says, “If we go back to the hospital you don’t have to tough out a ten-hour car ride where you want to puke your guts out.”

“No,” Eddie says, and scowls down at his hot chocolate, a little mad at them for detracting from his brunch experience. Brunch is a meal for trust-fund college kids, anyway. Eddie’s an adult and he shouldn’t be doing things like making up meals or eating breakfast for dinner or—

Actually breakfast for dinner sounds fun, so long as Richie isn’t putting maple syrup on top of things in front of him again. Violating some kind of meaningless rule. Eddie’s forty and trying to rebel against authority and maybe he’ll start with some pancakes. It would be okay if Richie put maple syrup on pancakes.

He needs ibuprofen for his muscle aches, because there will be times when his prescription painkillers wear down in their effectiveness before he's scheduled for another dose and Eddie’s muscles are screaming knots despite the electric blanket that functions as a full-body heating pad. And—he wants junk food, too. Not that he’s banking entirely on the variety available at a drugstore, but his brain is full of Swiss rolls and gross pie things from gas stations and chocolate-covered gummy bears, which sounded heinous the first time he heard of them but now sound intriguing, except he’s not very hungry right now.

He requests Advil and snacks.

Richie raises his eyebrow. “Snacks?”

“Snacks,” Eddie confirms, and refuses to clarify.

Richie doesn’t even make a joke out of it, just accepts his shopping list, pays for his breakfast—and Eddie’s hot chocolate—and goes to the drugstore with Mike.

* * *

Ben says, “So when you say you’ve never enjoyed food.”

Eddie is back on the couch in Ben and Bev’s hotel suite. They were nice enough to go with him up to Richie’s room—using the spare keycard Richie dropped on the table in front of Eddie as he departed—to fetch the electric blanket, and now Eddie’s wrapped in it like a burrito with it on a solid two, trying to cook himself down into some kind of limp noodle. Bev sits in the center of the couch, leaning less and less subtly into the warmth of the blanket—which is good, because every time Eddie touches her exposed shoulder her skin is cool and he’s getting worried about her. On her other side is Ben, who is by now looking at Eddie speculatively and completely ignoring _A League of Their Own_ on the hotel television.

Eddie’s not sure what Ben’s getting at or how he should respond to it. What is there to say about it?

“Fat, grease, and salt were the enemy,” he says. “No fast food, no take-out, no pizza delivery. Mom cooked, and she cooked little portions, and she barely ever ate what she made—”

Unkindly Eddie thinks of the snack food lining the cabinets in the kitchen and how _those are Mommy’s treats for working hard, okay, Eddie-bear? When you’re a grown-up with a grown-up job you can treat yourself too, and you’re a growing boy, you need healthier fare_ , but he never had, and for the longest time it was because he assumed he’d reached a certain level of being a grown-up where he no longer wanted them.

“No restaurants. Organic this, organic that, no bovine growth hormone, no GMOs, none of those—those chickens that can’t stand up under their own weight.” He grimaces. “Well-done meat. No salmonella, no parasites, no _Monsters Inside Me_ , no tapeworms, no dairy, no nuts, no gluten, no soy.”

Ben is looking at him like he’s also trying to mentally divine a menu there based on the things Eddie’s telling him, using the process of elimination. Eddie knows it’s a struggle; he’s been there. “Vegetables?”

“ _Sometimes_ ,” Eddie says, because vegetables are a loaded topic too. Chemicals on them, pesticides. Mushrooms grown in animal fertilizer with dirt and god knows what else clinging to them in their little foam containers. Careful labels on everything in the fridge with the date it was bought and the date it had to be thrown out. Myra worked fast food when she was a teenager and still talks about her Serve-Safe certification. Eddie’s kitchen should have had her accreditations framed on the wall.

And when Eddie didn’t have the time or the inclination to wait for his homemade lunch to heat up in the office microwave, sometimes he went down to the cheese and wine store on the corner outside the office and bought a sandwich. They made them to order right there in front of him, soft bread rolls and roast beef folded carefully and the neatly-placed wedges of cheese and a salty pickle spear tucked into the bag for him. Eight dollars. Eddie tried only to pay cash for it, afraid that Myra would look at their accounts and see a charge for a liquor store and assume he was hiding something far more devastating than an overpriced sandwich.

Ben’s are better, anyway.

“That’s kind of how it’s been for me,” Ben says quietly. “Salad and salad mixes, and Weight Watchers, and…” He grimaces. “I bought half a cow from a local farmer this summer and I’m gonna be eating my way through it for like the next year.”

Eddie has the vague impression that that’s good, because it’s better for the environment to buy locally and factory farming is an abomination for which mankind will have to answer one day. But he’s anxious at the same time—even though the meat in question is nowhere near him and it’s not like Ben is requesting he eat it or anything—about whether local regulations are as rigid as state or federal, and under what jurisdiction small cattle ranchers fall, and how often private butcher’s shops are cleaned, and—

“But I haven’t liked eating much in a while either,” Ben says, calmly interrupting the beginnings of Eddie’s smile.

“Me neither,” Bev says. Eddie turns his head to look at her. She’s watching the baseball smack into Geena Davis’s palm with the ghost of a smile.

Eddie remembers, suddenly, a game that they played outside Keene’s pharmacy, just the three of them. Well, and some little squeaker who couldn’t beat Bev at pitching pennies, so he spat _your mother’s a whore!_ at her and then ran for his life when Ben just roared at him and charged. Eddie understood, in that moment, everything that his mother had always slyly implied about Beverly Marsh, as Bev started to cry. He’d had no concept of it beforehand, despite hanging around Richie “Trashmouth” Tozier, but just the way that dumb kid threw it at Bev, he understood.

_My mother is not a nice woman._

That was an interesting thought to have. Sonia Kaspbrak took care of Eddie, and that was nice of her, wasn’t it? There were some parents who didn’t take care of their children at all—and Bill suggested, sometimes, that this was what his parents were turning into, too busy looking at the empty space Georgie left behind. But Eddie understood then that Sonia wasn’t like the other mothers—not like Mrs. Uris, who invited the boys in and only calmly and quietly admonished them for their language when they got too loud; or like Maggie Tozier who would allow things to build only so far until she would say, _That’s it, Richard, it’s time for your friends to go home,_ and Richie would beg and plead and Bill and Eddie would creep out awkwardly and Stan would march out without even a hint of discomfort on his face, _Thank you for having me, Mrs. Tozier_. _You’re welcome, Stanley._

And at the same time Eddie felt terribly guilty, because if he thought that his mother wasn’t a nice woman, what did that say about him as a son? Nice sons didn’t think those things about their mothers—didn’t disagree with their mothers the way Eddie did, quietly, in his head, almost constantly for years, until it built up and built up and—

“You wanna order room service?” Bev asks.

Over an hour later Richie comes back with a knock on the door. When Ben goes to let him in, he finds Bev and Eddie crouched around a plate like animals hoarding a kill. He stops just inside the doorway and takes a deep breath like he can smell it.

“What the hell is that?” he asks, reasonably.

“Irish nachos,” Bev says. “Waffle fries with cheddar cheese, bacon, sour cream, salsa, and pickled jalapeños.”

Richie whistles, too loud for a hotel room, and takes a few more steps inside, lifting his head to inspect the tray on the table as though its secrets can only be divined from a distance. Then he looks at Eddie with half a grin on his face, mouth open, that _fucking_ overbite.

“You’re eating pickled jalapeños?” he asks.

Eddie, mouth still sour and burning, nods.

Richie crosses his arms and leans onto the back of one of the chairs. “I don’t know if I believe you.”

“Eat a dick,” Eddie suggests, which makes Richie snort laughing and Bev giggle. He reaches out and grabs one of the waffle fries, cheese pulling away from the mass in strings, and crams it in his mouth. He tries to chew on the side that doesn’t have a stab wound in it, because while he _thinks_ it’s mostly healed, that’s a mistake he’ll only make once.

It’s disgusting. It’s also fucking delicious, sour and hot and savory and tangy and starchy. There’s a thread of cheese hanging off his lower lip and he sticks out his tongue to catch it. The potatoes crush up soft in his teeth. There’s definitely something wrong with the tooth that was part of his stab wound, because heat and cold both make it ache—but the sheer joy of eating something this weird and probably bad for him is enough to put that aside almost entirely. He swallows, his mouth still watering.

Richie has a perfectly bland look on his face, though his eyebrows are slightly raised. He brings up both hands and begins a slow clap. “Somewhere, eleven-year-old Eddie is having a shitfit,” he says calmly, clapping arrhythmically.

Eddie wrinkles his nose at the suggestion and reaches for his water to rinse some of the burn out of his mouth. “What do you mean, ‘somewhere’? We know exactly where.”

“What happens in Derry stays in Derry,” Richie says.

There’s a faint sinisterness not just to his words but also his tone, and Ben looks around at him with a creased forehead and faint frown.

Bev says, “No, that’s what we’re trying to avoid, Richie. We did that for twenty-seven years.”

“Oh, my mistake,” Richie says, lowering his hands. He waggles his eyebrows at Eddie. “Trade you good news for a fry.”

“Irish nacho,” Eddie says. “And it better not be about my mom.”

“I wouldn’t say your mother is good news, I’d say she’s _great_ news, because my dick is—” His voice cracks down into a booming Tony-the-Tiger growl. “— _gr-r-r-r-eat._ ”

Eddie grimaces, trying to hide the short jerks of his chest as he stifles a laugh, and turns to Bev to confer.

“No nachos for you,” Bev says. Eddie nods.

“I don’t see any nachos here,” Richie says. “I see a bunch of white people on some waffle fries. And I don’t think any of you are even Irish.”

Eddie frowns, quickly doing a rundown of possible origins of the Losers’ last names. Bev’s recuses herself from the discussion by eating more loaded fries.

“Did you leave Mike at the store?” Ben asks drily.

“Yeah, you know him, he’s so little and sneaky, he just slips away.”

Richie plants an elbow on the table next to Eddie and leans all the way across to grab a fry. His shoulder eclipses most of Eddie’s view of the room, and the smell of leather comes over him again—mixed with something chemical. Eddie doesn’t know if it’s because it’s a newer leather jacket—and also fuck Richie for going out and buying a second leather jacket while Eddie was in the hospital, because _wow_ —or because he was hanging out in a drugstore for a little bit. Richie is almost delicate as he extracts a fry from the heap on the plate, carefully balancing its scoop of salsa and sour cream, the trailing ends of threads of cheese, and the jalapeño that stands in a little dot on top, like a crown. He opens his stupid wide mouth and crams the whole thing inside, looking like a python eating an egg.

And then he talks with his mouth full.

“Nah, he said he was going to a camping store, and I offered to go with him, but—” Richie chews two or three times and Eddie can see the moment that the heat from the jalapeño hits him because his eyes pop a little and he covers his mouth with his hand. “Damn,” he says, still muffled, and reaches out for a second one before he’s even finished chewing. He pulls the fry out as carefully as if he’s playing Jenga and holds it in his hand—stupid big hand with the stupid long fingers and the big sharp joints of his knuckles. “—but I think he realized how many _tent_ jokes I would make and he declined my offer.” Richie looks down at the plate in something like bewilderment and then looks around at Ben. “I’m gonna need like two more plates of these.”

Eddie elbows him in the side. He gets Richie under the ribs where he’s soft; Richie hisses and leans away from him.

“So that I’m not stealing from you!” Richie protests. “Look, you’re little, it’d be a crime to take food out of your mouth—you too, Bev, you’re like a doll. Haystack.” He surveys Ben almost speculatively. “You can fight me for the fries.”

“Nachos,” Ben corrects. He’s smiling a little, looking amused by Richie in general.

“I’m not fucking little,” Eddie grouses.

Which Richie responds to by putting one hand on top of Eddie’s head and ruffling his _disgusting greasy_ hair so hard it feels like an open-handed noogie. “Cute, cute, cute,” he sings, and it’s such an old gesture that Eddie grits his teeth and feels like a child all at once, like what he should do next is lunge at Richie and try to take it out of his hide.

But Eddie’s hurt. And either Richie would be nice about it—would let Eddie wrestle him like they’re kids again, which considering the little red scab across the bridge of Richie’s nose seems likely—or Eddie would manage to land himself back in the hospital.

It’s just not fair. Eddie feels breathless with the sheer unfairness of his life and his body and the entire world, and he can’t even take it out on Richie.

Richie is chewing with his mouth open again. How is Eddie attracted to this man? It’s like he was a kid and his brain and body decided, _Okay, that one,_ and decided that no matter what Richie did Eddie would follow him around and berate him for it and love him.

“So do you want your drugs or what?” Richie asks. “That’s the good news. Your scrips are in. You are a relatively free man.”

Eddie does, in fact, want his drugs. He wants his drugs not so he can take them but so that he can say he’s checked all of the boxes on the list of things he has to accomplish before he can leave the state of Maine and drive, guilt-free, into the sunset with Richie Tozier.

Or—into upstate New York. Also with Richie Tozier. For three weeks.

Eddie feels small and grouchy so he wears the unplugged electric blanket like a cape over his shoulders into the elevator, the cord coiled in his hands. He feels like a goddamn hobbit, but it’s weirdly comforting in a way, like he’s wearing a Halloween costume or something, like he’s not himself. Like all of this is happening to someone else.

He holds onto the handrail and leans against the wall and grits his teeth hard as his head swims to the movement of the elevator.

“Is this the kind of situation where me being distracting is helpful, or the kind of situation where if I talk you’ll knock my teeth in?” Richie asks pleasantly.

It’s two floors. It’s a very short elevator ride.

“Rich, literally everything you do is distracting,” Eddie says. “You are inherently distracting as a person. You possess all of the qualities of an excellent distraction, which was why you were always lookout when we were kids, and somehow you still managed to be really bad at doing it on purpose.”

“Oooh, compliment me more,” Richie coos.

Eddie flips him off with the hand holding the knotted power cord. Richie smiles back at him, pleased as ever to be insulted. Eddie lowers his finger and looks at the floor so he doesn’t have to look at Richie beaming reflected in the mirrored walls.

“I’ll try the Dramamine,” Eddie says. “It should help with the motion sickness.” That’s what it’s for. He can practically taste the sour bitter chalkiness on his tongue already, and then he feels pressure on the back of his tongue.

_Please no._

The elevator doors open and Eddie lurches out under his blanket cape, walking as quickly down the hall as he can manage. He’s stiff from the neck down, basically—pain stretching up from his ribs and his chest wound into his shoulders, and then down from his back into his hips and thighs and calves and feet because he’s unused to walking around, because apparently a couple of weeks in the ICU is enough to cause muscular degeneration on at least _some_ scale, and he has to move slowly, but he moves deliberately.

“So I wanted to talk to you about travel plans,” Richie says as he unlocks the door with the keycard, oblivious to impending disaster. As always, he holds the door open for Eddie, hand placed high up on it so that Eddie can walk under his arm.

A pulse of certainty shoots from Eddie’s stomach to his throat. He walks into the hotel suite without responding, throws the blanket onto the couch—which Richie folded up into a couch again at some point—and walks into the bathroom. He closes the door. When he hits the switch for the light the vent starts automatically, and the whirring noise is good, but he has no illusions about whether it will be loud enough, so he switches on the shower _that he’s not allowed to use_ and lets the water pound like hail into the porcelain tub.

He throws up. It’s bad, so soon after eating that he feels like everything barely hit his stomach, and then he keeps retching, standing up with his right forearm braced against his torso so that the contractions of his muscles don’t hurt his chest, his broken ribs. He puts his left hand on the wall behind the toilet and tries to hold himself up, but with that weird certainty through which the body preserves itself, all of his weakness seems to fade away in the actual act of vomiting.

“Eddie?”

_No, no, no._

“Don’t—” Eddie chokes, gags, dry heaves, and the door opens.

He should have locked it. Stupid. He should have locked it.

He fumbles automatically for the flusher because he doesn’t want Richie to see, tries to force out the words _Get out_ but it’s like talking in a dream, and he keeps gagging and spitting and his mouth and nose and throat burn.

Richie’s hands close on either side of his head and hold him up. Pressure on Eddie’s temples, weirdly comforting at the same time as it’s humiliating.

“I gotcha,” Richie says. He’s standing behind Eddie.

Eddie doesn’t want to be had, Eddie wants to do everything himself for maybe the first time in his life, and he _can’t_ because his body’s out of his control—he thought he could get it under his control, once he wrested it out from other people’s grips, but it turns out he wasn’t enough in the first place, and—

He’s crying. He’s definitely crying. His eyes are running and his sinuses are swelling. He gags, coughs, spits, and grimaces.

He’s still nauseated. That’s what tells him it’s something inherent to him, not food poisoning or the like—not that it’s even been long enough since he ate for him to have food poisoning, unless it was the hot chocolate or the bagel—

Eddie starts giggling.

Richie appears in his peripheral vision, head tilting sideways to look Eddie in the face, and Eddie closes his eyes so he doesn’t have to see his expression. “What?”

“Cream cheese,” Eddie manages.

There’s a pause, and then Richie’s broad triumphant voice, too loud for this little room: “So are you saying I was right?”

“No—” His voice feels like it’s trying to come out of a pinhole, like there’s no room for him in his body at all. He shakes his head, still laughing. It hurts his ribs. Everything hurts his ribs, and his chest. Why did they discharge him at all, if he’s not fit to be walking around like this? His closed eyelids burn. “—I’m saying—” Raspy all the way. “—but what if you were?”

“Truly a sign of the apocalypse,” Richie agrees. His voice fills up the space, him and the refilling toilet and running shower and over their heads the humming vent. Eddie can barely believe that Richie can hear him in the first place, and then he wonders what if Richie’s lipreading him, and he hates the idea of Richie looking at his mouth right now. “You done?”

“Fuck you,” Eddie says, and it comes out… wrong. Sincerer than Eddie’s ever said it—angry, but not mean. Just helpless. It’s like if Eddie fell on his face in front of Richie and pounded the ground because he was furious at himself, choked with self-pity, and Richie just had to stand there and watch. He opens his eyes—tears roll out like horses out of the gate, stinging like acid—and flushes the toilet once more.

Ben spent money on that room service. What a waste.

Eddie rips off a couple of squares of toilet paper and wipes his mouth and blows his nose, jerking his head as he tries to duck out from under Richie’s hands. It’s not effective—Eddie’s unsteady and has to brace himself on the doorframe, because now he’s done his whole body is trembling, shivering, weak and cold—but Richie releases his head.

“Was that the elevator?” Richie asks.

“I don’t fucking know,” Eddie says in his stupid delicate voice. “It could have been the elevator. It could have been the meds. It could have been my stomach capacity. It could have been the first fucking rich food I’ve had in my life—it could have been any number of things, because I’m fucking broken, all right, Richie? I don’t know.”

“’Kay,” Richie says calmly in his bright accepting tone, like this is all part of the game. Richie asks a stupid question, Eddie rips into him for it, Richie goes into paroxysms of delight over being abused so.

Eddie’s not playing. Eddie is weak and small and stupid and self-pitying and he thinks that if he and Richie were actually fighting, Eddie would be going for blood right now, but Richie’s not the problem. Eddie’s the problem.

“You want to lie down?”

“No,” Eddie grumbles, but he doesn’t have a choice. _Not_ the bed—not where he dreamed of the leper, peeling off its skin and revealing all along where the problem lay. Not where he’ll be vulnerable. He lurches back out to the kitchenette and yanks one of the many bottles of water out of the minifridge. There’s a second sink in the kitchenette, a big industrial metal number that Eddie swishes and spits into, feeling _sick_. Then he staggers over to the couch and collapses down on top of his abandoned blanket.

He puts his face into it. It’s a heavy artificial fiber, and he can feel the wires inside it. Like a kid, he feels comforted.

Richie is still standing just outside the bathroom doorway. Eddie can feel him watching him, and he hates him for it, just a little.

“So I have a proposition for you,” Richie says.

Eddie sighs. “Really?” he asks, muffled.

“Yeah, that’s what I was saying before you had some kind of allergic reaction to my presence.”

Eddie snorts. He doesn’t have any allergies; and it’s so like Richie to make this about him, an extension of the offer for distraction in the elevator. He feels mixed familiarity and irritation, added to the childish swirl of _everything is terrible_ in his head.

“So I know you want to get on the road tomorrow,” Richie says.

If Richie suggests they go back to the hospital, Eddie really will start shouting. He’s always hated _I told you so_ ’s, and they rarely came from Richie’s direction—usually Stan or Bill, actually, which was enough to send Eddie into furious stomping tantrums when they were in grade school. He can feel himself regressing, back to someone who hated being small and hated being weak and hated being babied or pitied, and so lashed out when he was scared.

He feels something click into place in his head. A faint memory.

_Scared, Eddie-bear?_

“And Ben so kindly offered to allow us to crash what is clearly a honeymoon phase of him and Bev having wild monkey sex in his cottage in the forest, where I’m sure no murders have ever happened,” Richie goes on.

Eddie doesn’t have the energy to respond to that, obscene as it is.

“But that’s ten hours in a car.”

“And?” Eddie manages.

“So,” Richie says, “what if instead of doing ten hours all in one shot, we did five hours tomorrow, and then five hours the next day, and paced ourselves?”

Eddie doesn’t really know what happens to him when he hears that.

All his shivery weakness goes away, but the cold stays there. It settles on his skin, almost, forming a patina. Metal, implacable.

Slowly Eddie slides his forearms under him on the couch and lifts his head and chest up from the cushions so he can look at Richie. He has to move slow—he’s not really frightened about popping stitches right now, though he suspects he probably should be—to balance his weight and make sure it lands on his hips, not on his broken ribs. He reaches out and braces his left hand on the arm of the couch to hold himself up.

Richie is leaning against the far wall, his leather jacket still on. With his crossed arms he’s posed like some kind of bad boy from a teen movie. The anxious look on his face ruins it.

Eddie’s eyes feel swollen and his cheeks feel raw and he should definitely brush his teeth.

“No,” he says. It comes out stronger than he thought his voice would allow right now. He’s almost relieved.

Richie’s eyebrows lift. His anxious look smooths out, becoming cool in turn. Matching Eddie’s tone. Mimicking him.

Eddie doesn’t want to have to justify himself right now, but he strongly suspects that Richie’s not going to say anything, is just going to keep looking at him sprawled pathetic on the couch—which is where Richie slept last night because Eddie put him out of his own bed.

“I’m not slowing down Ben and Bev,” he says. “Bev wants to get away as bad as I do, if not more. I’m not making her wait any longer.”

Richie shakes his head. “You and me,” he says. “Separate car. Ben and Bev basically get a headstart, get to christen every room in what I imagine is Ben’s impeccably designed house—”

“Beep,” Eddie says. The air in his lungs feels hot.

Richie falls silent. Eddie doesn’t even have to give the second beep. Richie’s left eyebrow flicks minutely higher, turning his gaze challenging. His chin lifts slightly. Portrait of Richie Tozier, combative but listening.

Eddie takes another breath. It’s hard, with his chest restricted like this. Feels kind of good to struggle for it, actually. He takes strength from that.

“Tell me what you were actually going to say about our travel plans,” he says. “Before I puked my guts out.”

Richie blinks once, expression shifting to surprised, like Eddie wasn’t going to put the pieces together.

“Uh, I was gonna say—” He tilts his head back, gaze flicking up toward the ceiling like he’s trying to remember his exact phrasing. “‘You remember how you fucked my mom and never called her back, you son of a bitch? Well, karma’s coming around and his name is Richie Tozier, I’m kidnapping you and taking you to Connecticut.’”

It’s such a stupid thing to say that Eddie believes him immediately, believes that’s what Richie was gearing up to say as they were walking into the suite. It’s also completely not what he was expecting. Several things slot to place in Eddie’s mind—that Richie’s parents are alive, living in Connecticut and “doing white people things,” as Richie put it; that Connecticut is something of the midway point between here and New York; and that Richie’s been texting his mother. That Richie had a very publicized breakdown and then, presumably, went off the grid. That Richie said Maggie Tozier was asking for proof of life.

“Oh,” Eddie says. The iron melts out of him. It’s unnecessary. Self-involved of him. Childish. Temper tantrum.

“Yeah, _oh_ ,” Richie scoffs.

Eddie takes a deep breath, sits up all the way, and releases it. His lungs still feel tight. He doesn’t know whether that’s the stress or just the materials he’s working with right now.

“Rich, if you wanna go see your parents, you don’t have to take me with you,” Eddie says. “You can just—I mean—” He doesn’t really understand healthy relationships with your parents, so he takes a shot in the dark. “—if they’re important to you and you want to see them, you can just go. You don’t have to, uh.”

Oh, _somewhere_ in there Eddie made a mistake.

Richie _points_ like a hunting dog, body coming off the wall and snapping to attention like he’s about to cross the room to get to Eddie, but he doesn’t. Not because there’s a table in the way, either. The perpetual slouch goes out of him and Richie is once again _big_ and broad-shouldered and now he’s alert and focusing all his attention on Eddie.

“Don’t have to what?” he asks. His tone is gentle. He’s not smiling; he’s just showing his teeth. Oh god.

This is the second time he’s done this today, Eddie says, trying to make sense of an emerging pattern. What did Eddie do that triggered that response? What’s it building towards? What defused Richie earlier at the table?

He has no idea. He has no choice but to answer Richie’s questions.

“You don’t have to wait for me,” he says, because it’s the truth. “If you—” He almost grimaces when he says it but he pushes through it. “—want to get back to your life, you can. You don’t have to worry about me.”

And why wouldn’t he? Richie has a great life: he’s semi-famous; he doesn’t owe anything to anybody; he doesn’t even seem to care much about his work, based on his inability to recognize his own material from the mouth of a fan. And—Eddie swallows, watching Richie practically shift the light balance in the room with the force of how hard he’s staring at Eddie—he’s sure there are people waiting for him.

Richie doesn’t date. Doesn’t do relationships; doesn’t get involved in the emotional baggage, and Eddie comes with a whole hell of a lot of baggage, literal and figurative. He’s not gonna want what Eddie has to offer, if Eddie ever gets around to spitting out the words when he’s not half-comatose and drugged to the gills. There’s a sunk cost fallacy and then there’s—whatever this is. Just because Richie has sunk a lot of effort into taking care of Eddie (ugh), fulfilling whatever stupid whims he has—it doesn’t mean he has to. He can just cut loose and walk away and go back to his life, and Eddie can—can go to New York with Ben and Beverly and go about the work of trying to figure out who the hell he is in the absence of all the structure he’s been growing around for the last few decades.

Richie does not move in the wake of this statement. He stares at Eddie, his closed mouth stretching wide and thin. Furious.

And then he storms toward the door.

Something in Eddie buckles— _don’t leave me! I knew you would leave me! I always knew you would leave me!_ —and he recoils from it, revolted by his own response. He almost wants to say _If you have to go, then go,_ but this is Richie’s hotel room, Eddie’s the one who should go, but Eddie can’t, and he’s forcing Richie out, and—

Richie turns around, shoulders basically level with his ears, standing in front of the door. His jaw is clenched. Eddie can’t hear his teeth grinding—fuck, they never turned off the shower in the bathroom—but he knows what that pulsing muscle or tendon or whatever the fuck it is means.

When Richie speaks, his tone is deceptively calm.

“I thought we worked this out,” he says.

Eddie has no idea what that means, because he knows there are _ample_ other things he has to work out with Richie and at the moment the matter of what’s settled is kind of difficult for him to focus on while he’s trying to manage the shifting gears of whatever Richie is doing. Apparently this is reflected in Eddie’s face, because Richie goes on.

“That I’d go with you,” he says.

 _I’d go._ Not _I’m going_.

“I mean—I’m not gonna hold you to that, if you…”

Richie seems to swell with anger, chest expanding so much that Eddie almost expects to hear the leather jacket creak. “If I want to go back to my _precious little life_ , yeah. Thanks for that, Eddie, for cutting me that favor. Before I go, can you do me one more?” Eddie blinks but before he has time to calculate a response for that, Richie asks, “Can you tell me _where the fuck I can get another Eddie Kaspbrak?”_

It’s so venomous that Eddie reels back a little. Richie’s always been good at that—good-natured to a point, and then he cuts where it’ll hurt. Eddie swallows around his numb tongue, trying to find some of that steel he had earlier, but it’s gone.

“Because this one’s broken?” he asks, voice too high and too vulnerable.

For a moment they stare at each other across the suite.

Then Richie exhales and blinks slowly and his shoulders slump a little, no longer ready to huff and puff and blow the house down.

“Because you fucking died,” Richie says. “You _died_ , Eddie. You were _dead_. You—” He waves a hand, fingers twirling in a way that makes Eddie think of bugs flying away or something, and then he jabs at his own chest. “—but I knew you were dead, Eddie. You didn’t know, but I knew.”

“Why the fuck is me dying about you now?” Eddie demands.

Richie seems to be physically shaking now. “You—” He holds both hands out in front of him, cupped toward each other like he’s holding Eddie’s head again, like maybe he’d like to grab him by the shoulders and shake him. “—you died, and I thought, ‘That’s it,’ and then you came back, and then you died _again_ , and I thought, ‘Shit, that’s for sure it this time,’ and you _still came back_ , you fucking indestructible little monster. Why the fuck—” He presses his hand to his mouth hard.

“Richie,” Eddie says. He sounds defeated. Maybe he is. “I am so tired.”

Richie lowers his hand and lets out a breath. “ _Fuck_ my life,” he says. “I’m going with you, literally wherever you let me. You wanna go back to Derry and dig your phone out of the fucking cave-in? Stupid idea. I’m in. You want to go do fucking astronaut training in the desert? Okay. You don’t—you—” More flailing, more reaching out, grabbing something that’s not there, almost pleading. “—you don’t get _fourth chances_ , Eddie.”

Eddie realizes that his stinking mouth is open, his jaw hanging useless with shock.

Richie doesn’t want to go back to his life either. And while technically all of them had a near-death experience or two, Eddie’s was definitely the biggest. And sometimes just that catalyst is all that you need.

In the wake of that, Richie goes slack and leans back against the door and fidgets a little, pushing at his hair with his hands. “Also, I don’t know what part of ‘come with me to my parents’ place’ made you think, _Ah, yes, this guy’s trying to dump me like a sack of hot trash_.”

Eddie grits his teeth and wraps one arm around himself and closes his mouth and presses the knuckles of his numb hand to the line of his lip and _tries_ not to cry again. “I don’t want you to have to.” His voice cracks. Fuck.

“Have to what?” He sounds like he genuinely doesn’t understand.

“I don’t want—” Swallow, choke it down. “—I don’t want you to have to hold my head, I don’t want you counting out my pills, I don’t want you to—to give up your bed, or to—I don’t want you to think— _I don’t want you to be her_.”

And Richie.

Richie fucking Tozier.

He leans one elbow casually on the door and drawls out, “Sugah, I caught a lot of things from your mother, but responsibility ain’t one of ’em.”

And Eddie is kind of teetering on a thin line of tears, so it’s no surprise that when he starts laughing—not giggling, full-on belly-laughing, painful, out of control, can’t breathe, can’t catch his breath, empty lungs—his eyes leak and tears carve tracks down his face, across the still-healing wound on his cheek. They drip off his chin. He’s never cried like this in his life, his jaw clenched, his nose running, his chest still gasping out hysterical laughter in something like convulsions. He pitches sideways into the arm of the couch and covers his head.

“Take right now, for instance,” Richie says. “Right now, I’m clearly endangering your health. There’s a lot more where that came from.”

Eddie can’t even get a breath into tell him to shut up, and honestly he doesn’t want to.

“And,” Richie says, “I don’t care that you just puked up everything you’ve eaten since the Clinton administration, don’t get comfy on my bed there. What, you think you can have everything in the room because you caught a little case of death?”

“Patty said I can do whatever I want,” Eddie gasps out.

“Teacher ain’t here, is she?”

“Thought you said you’d do astronaut training with me.”

“Did I say astronaut? Sorry, I just meant _ass_.”

Eddie can’t breathe and it doesn’t even matter. “What does that even mean?”

“Oh, honey, if you have to ask.” Richie loses some of the luxurious vowels of his taunting voice and asks in something like real concern, “Are you all right?”

Eddie nods and waves a hand for him to keep going. “They do that in the desert?”

“Yeah, it’s training because the sand gets everywhere.”

Eddie wraps both arms around his ribcage to brace himself, opens his mouth wide, and takes some gasping breaths. It feels like he has a sucking chest wound. Wonder why that might be.

“I knew you watched the fucking prequels,” he manages, once he’s gotten his breath back.

 _“How?”_ Richie demands, sounding genuinely baffled. “You keep saying _I knew this, I knew that_ —fucking _how_? And everybody watched the fucking prequels.”

“Because you’re _coarse,_ you’re _irritating_ , and you _get everywhere_.”

“Do you know _memes_?” Richie demands. “Who _are_ you?”

What the fuck is a meme? Eddie leans back against the couch and yawns hugely. “Eddie fucking Kaspbrak, apparently.”

“Apparently,” Richie agrees. He’s still hovering in front of the door, but now he’s self-conscious about it, doesn’t know how to hold his arms once he’s done raging. He sniffs and then asks, “So do you want to come to Connecticut with me? I’ll let you say gross things about my dad, now you’re out and proud.”

“Tempting,” Eddie says dryly. He tilts his head back and closes his eyes.

“Come on, the man said _open wide_ professionally for like forty-years, he’s low-hanging fruit. And if you fall asleep like that you’re gonna get a crick in your neck.”

“Fuck off,” he replies. Fairly pleasantly, he thinks.

“I’m just saying, just because I just vowed to follow you anywhere, don’t think you’re getting the Magic Hands services for free.”

 _“Do not fucking touch me._ ”

Richie laughs, and it’s fine, because he’s just Richie. Eddie can’t get another Richie Tozier either.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> EXPLANATION: Eddie gets sick. Richie holds Eddie's head while he's puking. Eddie is resentful that he needs assistance and tries to push Richie away emotionally. Richie seems to think it's all part of the bickering dynamic but Eddie's not playing.
> 
> AND:
> 
> Richie's wearing MeUndies boxers in the "Adventurous" pattern "Hot Stuff" that the website won't allow me to link to.
> 
> [Richie's lizard shirt](https://www.macys.com/shop/product/alfani-mens-classic-fit-lizard-print-shirt-created-for-macys?ID=10226934&tdp=cm_app~zMCOM-NAVAPP~xcm_zone~zPDP_ZONE_B~xcm_choiceId~zcidM06MJS-03e4e8a1-1bfa-44d2-8527-73c19f0ccb09%40H8%40customers%2Balso%2Bloved%2420627%2410226934~xcm_pos~zPos3~xcm_srcCatID~z20627) that Eddie's wearing.  
> [Richie's turtle shirt](https://www.macys.com/shop/product/club-room-mens-lyden-turtle-graphic-shirt-created-for-macys?ID=7299898&CategoryID=20627) that Richie's wearing.
> 
> And as always, thanks to my beta [qianwanshi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/qianwanshi/pseuds/qianwanshi) for advance reading, for catching my jokes and foreshadowing, and for her enthusiasm over Richie's "hot jaw muscle."
> 
> UPDATE:
> 
> [Richie: "Being what?"](https://twitter.com/miliitem/status/1236074420206174208) by [ Finn @miliitem ](https://twitter.com/miliitem) on Twitter.
> 
> AND [here's Eddie in his turtle shirt](https://twitter.com/clown_emoticon/status/1251320813459890176) by [zees @clown_emoticon](https://twitter.com/clown_emoticon) on Twitter.


	9. Clear for Takeoff

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Eddie reflects on the nature of desire. Richie pulls the Band-Aid off. Mike performs, and then so does Richie.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello! Thank you for your patience while I did a birthday fic instead of properly working on this one; here is your update. Thanks, as ever, to [qianwanshi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/qianwanshi/pseuds/qianwanshi) for troubleshooting the scenes I wasn't sure about; this chapter in particular needed her help, so thank her for me too.
> 
> Content warnings for this chapter: Eddie's still not woke in his proper usage of terminology; _Finding Nemo_ ; artistic license with medical instructions (Eddie's); discussions of gender roles (ugh), the way that women's nudity is viewed as inherently sexual (ugh, I know), and the idea that men are supposed to be hypersexual (ugh again); feelings of sexual inadequacy, voyeurism, masturbation; everything wrong with _Gremlins_ ; Richie uses the word "pussy" derogatorily again; Richie misuses the term "freebleeding"; Sonia Kaspbrak's A+ parenting; Eddie is wrong about _Hamlet_ ; I'm gonna have all my readers petition the FDA to require and pay for salmonella vaccines for chickens.

Eddie dreams again.

Not the leper or the leper-him hybrid again, mercifully. Instead it’s—not a nice dream, but a neutral dream. A little absurdist in nature. Absolutely the sleep paralysis happening again, with how he knows he’s dreaming but feels too foggy to come out of it.

The whole room in lush dark blue light and Richie’s on the other side of the bed with him. Eddie knows it’s a dream because he can’t see him—he just knows it’s him, in the weird way that you know things in dreams—and Richie looks more like a vague pale shape than anything else, defined by the negative space around him. And he’s talking in a low voice—lower than Eddie’s used to hearing out of him, he thinks—and it goes on for a bit, before Eddie realizes what he’s saying is, _No. No, you can’t. Stop. Please don’t go away. Please? No one’s ever stuck with me for so long before. And if you leave. If you leave. I just, I remember things better with you! I do, look! P. Sherman, forty-two… forty-two—_

Eddie wakes himself up with the incredulous thought, _Is that_ Finding Nemo _?_

He’s pretty sure it is, but he’s too tired and sleep-heavy to reach out and grab his phone and check it, and honestly that’s probably for the best. When he drifts off again Richie is still there and mumbles only nonsense that evaporates as soon as Eddie wakes up. The electric blanket shut off in the night—as well it should—and he’s shivering instead of sweating. He awkwardly rolls under the sheets, in the warm spot he made with his body over the hours, and closes his eyes again.

Then he remembers that he can take a shower today.

They said forty-eight hours after his release. But—his brain rapidly rationalizes—it’s not like they timed his discharge from the hospital relative to the time of day he received his injury. Forty-eight hours, give or take a few, is acceptable; it’s just two days. Right? Right. He gets up, shuffles over to the window, and checks that the sun is actually up before he gets his hopes up. It is. He’s in the clear.

His chest hurts and he moves like he’s wading through molasses, his legs aching all the way down from the hips. But he feels wired in a way he can’t remember feeling before—not when Mike called, that was full of dread and a sort of nihilistic _I mean, I survived this car wreck, by that measure I am doing great_. He can’t remember feeling excited for something good instead of something bad.

And that’s pretty indicative of how his adult life has gone so far, isn’t it?

Gingerly he pokes his head out of the bedroom door, ready to yank it shut again in the event that Richie’s awake. Richie’s not going to be awake, it’s like seven-thirty and it’s Richie, why would he be awake? If Richie’s sleeping there will be no reason to warn him that Eddie’s about to occupy the shower and he can just (figuratively) jump in without explaining himself.

As expected, Richie is asleep on the sofa bed, which takes up most of the living area, the very end of the metal frame resting just shy of the TV unit. One foot hangs over the edge of the bed, twisted carefully in the sheet as though Richie can’t stand to have his feet bare and exposed. His other leg is bent at the knee so his legs form a figure-four, and he seems to have graduated from hugging a pillow in his sleep to trying to suffocate the pillow to death under his own weight, based on how it’s crushed under his body.

Eddie stares for several long moments at his exposed back—his spine is like a channel down the center instead of a ridge of bone, because it’s bracketed by long thick muscle on either side and isn’t that interesting, how big Richie is, the rise and fall of his ribcage in time with the faint huff of his breath?—before he two things occur to him simultaneously. Nothing so clear as words, just concepts, coming too fast for him to process them: _he could be naked_ and _I could be that pillow_.

And then he whips the door shut so fast he almost takes his own nose off.

The slam is deafening in the early morning hush of the suite. There’s a scream of springs in the next room and Richie, sounding bleary and crazed, asks, “Eddie?”

“Nothing!” Eddie says, which is definitely not the correct response. He rests his head on the door and bares his teeth at himself, resisting the urge to hang onto the knob and rattle the door just to get some of his fury at his own idiocy out.

“Uh… okay,” Richie says. There’s a slightly more moderated creak of the springs from the sofa bed, and Eddie stands there uselessly until he hears the moderated deep breathing that means Richie’s asleep again.

Stupid. Very stupid.

Eddie sits on the bed with his feet on the floor and does some axillary stretches. They’re not quite as his discharge papers instructed him to—he should be sitting in a chair that will help his posture and help him hold himself up—but he has an idea that physical exertion is a better idea when it doesn’t involve actually throwing things in the suite or frantically shaking a door or other things that will probably wake Richie up again. Because he does not need to be witnessed in this, the weirdest mood he’s ever been in.

The exercise does help him realize that he definitely overexerted getting out of the hospital. His shoulders feel like steel cables ready to come through the skin, and not in a satisfying _you’re in good shape_ kind of way, but in a _you are dangerously dehydrated and your lactic acid buildup is borderline irresponsible_. He gives up when a shooting pain through his broken ribs knocks his breath out of him and then he drains the remainder of his bottle of water.

Shower. He just wants to take a shower, to focus on getting clean. Not in a frantic way trying to fight off rising panic, but just to wash off the whole hospital stay. He can’t wash off the last twenty-seven years of his life, but that interminable hospital stay feels like a good place to start. Like a way to manage the whole thing.

He used to try to take a pill for any odd little bad feeling that popped into his head, into his body, into his stomach, into his guts. It’s time for him to find something else to do.

He walks into the jack and jill bathroom to brush his teeth at the sink and gets blindsided by the sight of his stitches in the mirror. Looking at himself, at his own body, every day for most of his life means that he’s immune to the constants, but the glaring changes seem unconscionable. Like the pimples that have yet to calm down because he’s only been able to wash his face four times in the last two days, and that’s the half-assed job he’s done while trying not to make the long healing line on his face angry. Or the beard that is showing how difficult it is for him, at forty, to grow facial hair like an adult.

But mostly the stitches. He knew he was going to have trouble with the stitches—the vivid dream about the leper coming in and showing them off was a giant waving red flag that Eddie mostly ignored due to exhaustion and recurrent hypochondria. Now he’s distracted by them.

He can’t look at them and think of anything but barbed wire. It’s not that they look menacing or painful in any way—and they’re not—but something about the fiber of the stitches freaks him out. Barbed wire in places it shouldn’t be. Wound around a baseball bat in an art installation, or pulled free from a fence and left to hang on the ground. Something dangerous you could catch yourself on and have to get a tetanus shot.

It occurs to Eddie that he probably had a tetanus shot when he was in the hospital, probably while he was still in intense pain and going in and out of consciousness, but he should probably look at his records and his itemized medical bill to make sure that was done. He thinks it’s every ten years you have to get one? It would be nice to knock that off his to-do list for the next decade. And Mike probably also had a tetanus shot, because that blade Bowers was wielding—old and familiar as it was—could not have been kept in immaculate clean conditions for thirty years. Come to think of it, did Ben get a tetanus shot back in 1989? He should have gotten a tetanus shot. He probably needs another one, since Bev mentioned It cutting him in the mirror.

They ought to get group discounts on tetanus shots, is all Eddie’s suggesting.

In comparison to the thick stitches—done very neatly and symmetrically on the crooked line of the incision—the square white bandage underneath looks clinical and contained and tidy. It does not look like a manhole cover over a seeping horror. It looks like a bandage.

Eddie blinks at his own chest once, slowly beginning to identify the flaw in his plan. He turns slowly, looking over his shoulder, to examine the identical surgical site on his back—the row of stitches closing the incision above and below, and then the big square bandage Stan carefully applied.

He has never been able to get his right hand to the middle of his back even when he was a kid at his most flexible, and right now it’s out of the question. He has broken ribs and another incision from where his intercostal drain was placed under his arm, and he can’t get that arm over his head without walking it up the wall. And even if he did—now he can’t grip with his cold clumsy fingers.

Experimentally, he puts his left hand behind his back and tries to reach up to the bandage. He can get there, sure. But can he pinch the corner of the adhesive between his fingers? Can he peel it away carefully without disturbing his stitches? Can he hold that stretch for as long as it will take?

Signs point to no.

“Fuck,” Eddie says under his breath. He feels that he’s earned that one.

For a long moment he really does weigh the pros and cons of texting Ben to come up here and pick the bandage off his back so that he can take a shower. This inclination towards Ben is driven entirely by Stan’s report that Ben helped him clean up in the hospital bathroom. Eddie’s order of preference starts with Stan and then accepts Stan’s recommendations.

It’s still seven-thirty in the morning. There is no way that Eddie’s going to wake Ben up for this. The worst thing that could happen is that _Ben would do it_ , and then they would both know that Eddie asked him to, and that would be sitting between them as Eddie borrowed Ben’s house to hide from his divorce and also the rest of his entire adult life.

There is one logical solution to this problem. It’s a real Occam’s Razor type of situation.

There are no words for how much Eddie does not want to be logical right now. Forget doing his job, putting his feelings aside as part of his duty. Eddie is now inclined to be selfish—because of course he is, this directly affects him—and he does not want to have to confront the swirl of dread that comes from the idea of Richie seeing his bandages—of Richie _taking off his bandages_ —and what’s under them, and the stitches that, now he’s looking at them in the mirror, remind him more and more of animal teeth biting into something instead of holding his skin together. He does not want Richie to see him being held together by literal thread, tough and mean as that thread is.

_And why’s that, Eddie?_ a perfectly normal Manhattan-inflected voice asks in his head. It’s him. He’s somehow giving the thousand-yard stare into the mirror and also standing immediately beside himself, arms folded across his own chest (his stitches) and prompting himself to be honest.

He gives up and puts his head down on the bathroom counter. It is probably not granite, but it is very cold, and it suits his purposes right now.

Because it’s not that Eddie doesn’t want Richie to see him naked.

It’s that this is not how Eddie wants Richie to see him naked.

Even at home, Eddie hated taking off his clothes. Hated being naked in front of Myra—always feeling like he was committing indecent exposure in his own home or something, with his flaccid penis up between his thighs like a stupid little acorn and his chest exposed and vulnerable. Myra never made any mention of it either—she moved through their apartment like she didn’t see it, like it was unexceptional, and somehow the fact that she didn’t make a big deal out of it flustered Eddie worse than being caught naked at all. It went from _I am embarrassed to be seen naked_ to _I am embarrassed to be_ embarrassed _to be seen naked, because I shouldn’t feel that, because there’s nothing inherently sexual about nudity, there’s nothing inherently sexual or appealing about my body at all, and even though I’m standing here bare-ass naked with my dick hanging out I don’t have to worry about starting anything, because Myra will never get the wrong idea. There is nothing to start. Neither of us will ever be in the mood ever again_.

And it’s not that Myra’s lack of response to his nudity was incorrect in any way, really. He doesn’t know what he would have wanted her to do differently, except to not walk in on him when he was changing clothes at all, but that wouldn’t be fair because he couldn’t expect her to give him a wide berth in her own home either. They lived together.

Myra was self-conscious about herself in a different way, needing the lights out on those rare infrequent attempts they had sex, suggesting they try different positions _if it would help_ but blushing and then admitting she was nervous about how _undignified_ they were. Gasping and holding her clothes up in front of herself when Eddie accidentally opened the door on her dressing, so that Eddie closed the door again immediately and apologized. The apologizing never bothered Eddie, because her body was hers and she got to decide who looked at it and when, but it always felt like so much more of a violation to walk in on her than for her to walk in on him. Eddie supposes that, in the back of their minds, they had this idea about what _men_ need, the idea that Myra’s nudity was sexual where his comical—which is ridiculous. It’s just ridiculous.

And Eddie has kind of always felt insufficient as a man, unable to get it up for his wife when it was time, unable to come in a timely manner that would get every encounter over with as soon as possible, when they were both wincing with how uncomfortable they were. He doesn’t know where the idea about _men’s needs_ slipped into both their heads, but Myra brought it up once when they were talking about their sex life: _I know that men have… urges…_ And so Eddie did his best to pretend to have urges, of literally any sort, sexual or impulsive or athletic, and the only one he managed to keep up with on his own was just frantic jogging every morning, like he could run away from the shame of pretending to be asleep beside his wife and feeling the slight shift of the mattress as she worked her hand down and gave herself what she needed, because he could not. Eddie has never had _needs_ , never _allowed himself_ to have needs. Food and sex and sleep and water and shelter and exercise were all scheduled and regimented carefully in their proper allotments, in what was healthy and seemly and reasonable.

And now Eddie’s coming up from what feels like a thirty-year nap to discover he has been _ravenous_ this whole time.

The guy at the office who unbuttoned his shirt down to the third button the summer that the air conditioning was busted, and Eddie got tunnel vision staring at his collarbone. (Eddie visited an optometrists and had his eyes checked, then his GP to make sure his brain was processing visual input correctly.) A man in a suit at Starbucks who overpoured and spilled creamer over his hand, cursing to himself under his breath and sucking the web of skin between his index finger and thumb clean, and Eddie, who was only picking up a coffee for the receptionist because she expertly deflected Sonia when Sonia called to see why Eddie was ignoring her on his work phone, felt a pang in his guts so sharp that for the rest of the day he kept jabbing himself in the abdomen to see if his appendix was failing. A classmate in college who offered Eddie sympathy for—something, Eddie doesn’t remember what—and bent down to hug him, folding Eddie up against his narrow lanky frame.

He can look at Beverly and recognize she is beautiful—objectively, Beverly is beautiful, square-jawed and dreamy-eyed and looking like a painting. Patty is also beautiful in a way that’s more unusual and interesting—cat’s-eye glasses and broad smile and bright eyes, especially looking at Stan.

Myra told him that it would help their marriage if they exchanged compliments more frequently to make each other feel more appreciated, and he did not lie when he told her that she was beautiful, pink face and gold hair in contrast to her sharp black and white work clothes. He can see now that Myra was going for the kind of polish that Bev subverted effortlessly by showing up in a blazer with the knees of her jeans ragged. Myra won’t leave the house without her lipstick on, chasing that look that New York businesswomen have, polished with her hair carefully straightened. Eddie knows that smell, walking into their bathroom in the mornings as the Vidal Sassoon iron heated, as Myra peeled eye masks off her cheek bones. She put a lot of work into looking nice and she deserved to feel appreciated for it, so he told her that she looked nice and felt good about saying it because it made her smile and he meant her face and not her breasts or other things that men who _didn’t_ care about women as people would comment on. He cared about his wife as a person _so much._ He didn’t care about her body _at all_. He felt evolved.

And then there’s Richie.

Richie’s shirts are not ugly but they are riding a very fine line and if Richie were less audacious as a human being he would look ridiculous. He should look ridiculous. He couldn’t walk into a meeting room wearing those shirts; no one would take him seriously. He doesn’t dress like that onstage—in the airport on his phone Eddie rapidly discovered that actually looking at Richie wearing a blazer made him feel ill in a way he couldn’t quite quantify, like his brain was trying to reconcile two images laid just slightly offset from each other, and now he has no idea if it was because he remembered Richie at thirteen and watching an adult Richie deliver clearly hollow words was just too far into the uncanny valley for him or if it was because he really, _really_ likes Richie in a blazer, which is something to investigate _much_ , much later.

His hair looks like _that_ , and when he’s feeling particularly out of sorts instead of playing with it or pushing it out of his face like when he did when he was a kid, he sinks his fingernails into his scalp and scratches rapidly like he has lice, parody of idiocy. Eddie looked at his shoes at the Jade of the Orient and he doesn’t know why now any more than he did in the moment, and they were almost midway between a sensible brown shoe and a sneaker, with a red sole and orange laces. It’s a strange juxtaposition between _forty-year-old man that no one takes care of_ and _Hollywood-adjacent C-list celebrity trying to appeal to a hipster crowd_. Eddie _knows_ he showers every morning because he hears him, and somehow he still looks like if someone drew a possibly rabid raccoon as a person.

And Eddie _wants_ him.

Wants to wear his clothes, wants to push his hands into Richie’s hair, wants to just fucking _grab handfuls of him_ , wants to wait until Richie’s done singing to himself while he brushes his teeth (which he also does every morning, and it’s annoying, and Eddie loves it) and then kiss him without bothering with mouthwash. It’s completely outside any concept of attraction Eddie has ever understood. He doesn’t know how much this is affected or restrained by the cocktail of drugs in his system—he doesn’t know how much that prior concept of aesthetic appeal is affected by his fondness for sedatives and his deep refusal to allow himself to look at other men either. When Eddie was a kid he wanted to be around his friends all the time, he didn’t want playtime to ever end, he just wanted to be in their company all the time—and now Eddie wants to be next to Richie as often as possible, but next to isn’t enough, he wants to be closer. He wants to lean up against him. He wants him to be warm; he wants to be dazed with the smell of him and his stupid leather jacket— _you’re forty_ —in his lungs; he wants to wrap his arms around him and feel how much space Richie takes up; wants to crawl into bed with him and feel him sleep-hot and sweat-damp, wants to tuck his cold hands under his body and make him hiss and squirm because Eddie’s fingers are like ice cubes, wants to pull him down on top of him and squeeze at his back like he’s at a pottery wheel or something, wants him _heavy_. His body no longer recognizes the laws of physics: in his deepest, most sleep-unhinged desires, he wants to _try to occupy the same space as Richie_ and _fail_ , so that they can sit smashed together trying to resolve it, compressed, too tight, _what would that feel like? You want to be touched so bad, what would that feel like? Would that be enough? What if there is no enough and you chest-burster claw right through him trying to get to it?_

Where the fuck does _sex_ enter into that? It’s too big. Eddie can’t possibly try to solve that need with any one action, any one thing, any insert Tab A into Slot B. That’s not a _normal_ feeling, not a _normal_ hunger, not something his body knows how to hold—if it is even possible for a human body to feel that and not just give out, which Eddie’s not sure of right now.

There’s an itch behind his very back molars and he hooks one finger into his mouth, pad of his fingertip resting on the gum way in the back, the knuckles and phalanges resting in the sharp wet grooves of his teeth. He gnaws down experimentally— _is that it? Do you just need to feel like you bit off more than you can chew, and then you’ll be happy?_

It doesn’t help, and then he just feels stupid for sticking his finger in his mouth. When he takes it out there are little red dots pressed into the knuckles, and a long line under the biggest one from his incisor.

His dick is still completely offline. He doesn’t know whether he’s more upset or relieved by this, because on one hand, a boner is basically the last thing he needs right now, but on the other hand, it would be nice to know that his body can live up to at least one expectation. He suspects he’s going to have to wait for the pharmaceutical intervention to wear off and some of the aching pain in his chest to ease up before his body can even think about diverting blood flow. But what the fuck is all that frantic desire if it has nothing to do with _actual arousal_? He can’t jerk off until the weird impulse to bite something ( _no, it’s definitely a someone,_ his brain volunteers helpfully) goes away. This is not his body being a problem to be solved; this is Eddie turning without looking and smacking face-first into a wall and being concussed.

That’s the problem. Eddie is sexually concussed.

And the more immediate, practical problem, is that Eddie cannot exist in a room, feeling all of those things with their vague hungry direction towards Richie, while Richie peels a bandage off his back. He can’t. Interesting as it is, distracting from his own revulsion by his body as it is, there are two possible outcomes: Richie feels the same way, which Eddie is not equipped to handle in any capacity; or Richie doesn’t, and Eddie is emotionally primed to take _absence_ as _rejection_ right now, and something in him will curl up and die. And if, the first time Richie sees him naked, Eddie’s riddled with black twine and has a hole punched through his torso, how will Richie ever want him in any other capacity?

And he _just wants to take a fucking shower_.

He stands up straight—his ribs ache from the pressure of his own bodyweight anyway. He washes the saliva off his hand. He brushes his teeth carefully and avoids the stab wound in his cheek, the reason he forgoes the mouthwash, which makes him mad because he’d really feel better if he could scour with the little travel bottle of mouthwash right now, _fuck_ Henry Bowers, Eddie’s glad Richie killed him, that racist homicidal mouthwash-ruining motherfucker.

He turns and tries to get his left hand to creep up his own back. It doesn’t work—somehow his whole wrist and forearm are in his way, and he has no idea how the angle is supposed to go. It’s out of the question. Eddie had a wooden backscratcher back home. In an abstract way, he misses its power.

“You’re fucking forty,” he tells himself in the mirror, and goes to get a towel from the wetroom.

Richie is still asleep when he walks out. Eddie hovers in the kitchenette for a little bit, towel clutched at his collarbone so it fans over the rest of his chest. It would be ridiculous for him to go back into the bedroom and put on his pajama shirt, only to take it off again so that Richie can get to his back. He briefly entertains the idea of asking Richie to remove the bandage from under the shirt, but the idea is ludicrous—Richie wouldn’t be able to see what he’s doing and Eddie would have to stand there like he was letting Richie get to second base. _Don’t make it weird_ , he tells himself. _It won’t be weird if you don’t make it weird_.

“Richie,” Eddie says.

Richie jerks awake and looks around at him blearily. He says nothing but his eyes are wide, soft and vulnerable without his glasses, and his expression says _I am very startled_. He just stares at Eddie for a long moment.

Unsure, Eddie repeats, “Richie?”

Richie blinks hard and says, “Yeah.” He wipes at his face with the heel of his hand. Then he seems to come online, blinking hard and shaking his head. “You okay?”

“I need help,” Eddie says. He strings the words together like cars on a train, trying to keep it as simple as possible.

Richie gets an elbow under him and sits up properly, twisting around and drawing his knees up. The sheet gives up and slides off his shoulder, pooling in his lap. Eddie ruthlessly keeps his gaze on Richie’s face. “You hurt?” Richie asks with increased urgency. Of course he does.

“No,” Eddie says, and watches Richie visibly relax.

Richie does that. Richie asks him if something’s wrong and Eddie says no and Richie _believes him_. The concept makes Eddie feel like someone has just walked up and punched him hard in the sternum.

Richie reaches out to the coffee table where it’s pushed against the wall and grabs his glasses. He blinks one eye shut when he puts them on, like he’s afraid he’s going to poke himself in the eye with one of the swinging legs. Eddie has to resist the urge to take a step back, to put more space between him and Richie once Richie’s glasses are on and he can see.

_It’s only weird if you make it weird. This is a perfectly normal medical request._

“Whaddaya need?” Richie asks, his voice still sleep-gravelly.

Eddie swallows. “There’s a bandage on my back. I can’t reach it. I need to take it off before I can take a shower.” There’s no actual request in there so he grimaces a little and asks, “Can you get it?”

Richie stares at him for a long moment like he’s processing that.

If he just stares at Eddie long enough, _Please_ is gonna come out of Eddie’s mouth and then he’s gonna have to commit seppuku in the bathroom.

Then Richie says, “Yeah, sure, man.” He moves his legs to get up from the sofa bed and Eddie—maybe moonwalks back into the bathroom. He does not really feel himself moving his feet. The only other logical assumption is that at some point a motorized walkway manifested in the hotel suite, delivered Eddie to his destination, and then immediately vanished again. There is a small part of Eddie that thinks death would be a great way out of this, and then a vastly larger part of him that thinks _FUCK YOU FOR DOING THIS TO ME YOU FUCKING CLOWN_.

Richie comes into the jack and jill wearing a long-sleeved t-shirt and boxers. The t-shirt is illegible but has some kind of logo on it for what might be a boat cruise or something. He was definitely not wearing the shirt about a minute ago.

Eddie stands in front of the sink, feeling trapped-animal feral.

“Don’t look at my stitches,” he says quickly.

Richie nods, nervously making eye contact with Eddie in the mirror—which makes sense, because Eddie absolutely looks liable to lash out and bite him. Actually, is far more likely to bite than Richie could possibly anticipate.

“Okay,” Richie says, blasé, cool.

Eddie feels vastly uncool. “So it’s kind of like a sticker, and I can’t reach it, but, uh, there are stitches, under the bandage, and they’re, uh.” _Ugly_.

Richie blanches and leans back a little. “Is the bandage supposed to come off?”

Eddie stares at him, distracted from his own discomfort. Richie _bought_ the bandages. “Yeah?” he says, nonplussed.

“Like—if you pull it off, is it gonna rip out your stitches?”

The very idea of that gives Eddie phantom pain strong enough to make him shudder. “No!” he says. “The adhesive doesn’t go on the stitches, there’s, like, very little crossover.”

“And it’s okay to get them wet?” Richie asks. “Is this like a—you’re gonna take a shower and suddenly there are gonna be two dozen other Eddies that gotta avoid bright light that I’m not allowed to feed after midnight?”

Eddie stares at him, feeling vastly tired. “Yes, Richie,” he says. “I’m a gremlin.”

“Oh, you’ve already eaten after midnight?” Richie asks. “Because with the big brown eyes I thought you were a mogwai, but that would explain the, like, everything about you.”

The movie _Gremlins_ has bothered Eddie for years, and bothers him significantly enough that he’s okay with Richie bringing it up. As a distraction that is neither imagined physical pain nor Richie himself, it’s pretty good. He’s forty. He should be able to move through the world without encountering references to _Gremlins_. He still routinely finds himself nose-down in Cinemasins’ “Everything Wrong with Gremlins (in less than 8 minutes),” quietly fuming. It’s like as soon as the thought pops up in his head he can’t let it go—like his hatred of _Gremlins_ and not understanding _why_ he hates _Gremlins_ is like poling the hole where a tooth used to be in his gum.

But now he remembers. Richie was fucking _obsessed_ with _Gremlins_ from like age ten onward. And _Critters_. And _Ghoulies_. And _Ghoulies II._ And _Hobgoblins_. And _Gremlins 2: The New Batch,_ which Eddie was obliged to go see with him in 1990. They only had enough money between the two of them for one popcorn and one soda (it was Richie’s money; Sonia did not give Eddie an allowance because an allowance meant that he would have money for activities that did not involve her, but sometimes Eddie found change swept into corners in the school hallways). Eddie simultaneously knew that soda was bad for him and felt that Richie should be banned from having custody of the soda, so he held it and Richie put the popcorn in the cupholder between the two of them and every time Richie wanted a sip on the soda instead of whispering to Eddie to pass it he leaned across Eddie to slurp directly from the straw, and Eddie _hissed_ and swatted at him and—

“ _God_ I hate that movie,” Eddie groans.

—and every time Gizmo appeared on the screen Richie whispered in his ear, _Look, Eds, it’s you!_

Richie looks at him with big wounded eyes, like Eddie has just kicked a mogwai in front of him. “But _why_?”

Eddie grits his teeth. “The father has no concept of the basic law of supply and demand. _Mo-gwai_ is literally Cantonese for ‘demon.’ The first person to die is the only black person in the whole movie. For some reason a mysterious Chinese man shows up and makes an environmentalist argument? How did the old people survive being crushed with a snowplow? _And_ , of course, _you made me watch it forty times_.”

“But _Eddie_ ,” Richie pleads. _“Gizmo.”_

Like that’s an argument.

“Why haven’t you had enough of demons?”

_“Gizmo!”_

“There is all of _one_ nice mogwai and all the other mogwai beat up on him. I don’t know why you want to watch that.”

Instead of responding in words, Richie purses his lips into a little O and starts warbling in a way that’s immediately recognizable as the mogwai song.

“I fucking hate you,” Eddie growls, shoulders hunching. Richie breaks immediately and starts laughing, which means that he got what he wanted out of the interaction. Eddie stares at Richie’s toothbrush with its crazy bristles and the Sensodyne toothpaste—which he has definitely not used today. That should be fine. Eddie’s just gotta focus on his anxiety around his stitches, and the fact that Richie hasn’t brushed his teeth yet today, and his unstoppable resentment for Gizmo. Those are manageable things. Everything about this is stupid. It’s fine.

He rests one hand on the sink and keeps holding the towel to his chest, adjusting it a little so that his nipples are covered. God, this is dumb. He almost misses the hospital.

Richie seems to have stalled out near the mirror, unsure how to proceed. “So should I take off my glasses?” he asks, brows raised and eyes wide, looking at Eddie in the mirror.

Eddie cannot switch gears that fast. “Why?”

“So I can’t see your stitches.”

“Can you see enough to take off the bandage without your glasses on?” Eddie’s not really considering it, but it feels like kind of an obvious step that Richie’s forgetting.

“Uh, probably, you’re not that pale.” Richie takes half a step closer and the air in the room reduces by about half. He reaches out like he’s going to touch Eddie. All of Eddie’s skin wakes up, waiting for it, but the contact doesn’t come. “Does it hurt?”

Eddie is torn between the idea that he should express appropriate gratitude to Richie for doing him a favor and also that if he plays like he’s mad then Richie will have no idea what’s actually going on in his head. Instead he errs on the side of Stan Uris: irony so sharp it can cut. “Does the hole in my thoracic cavity hurt?”

“Does taking off the bandage hurt?” Richie asks, rolling his eyes. “I know Stan did it for you, but like, Stan’s Stan and I’m a fuckup.”

This is not that hard. Richie is just making things difficult.

“Have you ever removed a Band-Aid in your life?”

He _hears_ Richie smile, little wet click of his teeth and subsequent warmth in his voice. “Nah, I’m a pussy, I just wait for them to fall off.”

“Ugh.” Eddie doesn’t have to fake his disgust. “People like you are the reason that Band-Aids float around in public pools. You should be jailed.”

“Sometimes I don’t bother with the Band-Aid and I just freebleed out there.”

Eddie frowns and looks up, thinking how silly Richie would look with a Band-Aid between his eyes instead of that little red line. “Is that a thing?”

There’s a choked laugh in Richie’s voice that makes Eddie sure the answer is _Yes, but not in the context that I’m using it._ “Freebleeding? Yeah, man.”

Eddie’s just gonna move on from that one. He adjusts his hand on the edge of the sink. “Just pull it off. Don’t put pressure on it or, like, on my back.” His ribs hurt. “And don’t look at the stitches.” He knows how conspicuous they are. “Or the wound,” he adds, a very real concern occurring to him. “You’ll throw up.”

“I will not.”

“I don’t believe you.”

Richie gives a short laugh and then says, voice uncharacteristically serious, “Okay, I’m not looking at your stitches, but does the adhesive or does it not go over them.”

Eddie takes a breath. He’s getting anxious here waiting for Richie to literally and figuratively pull the Band-Aid off. “A little bit.”

“And you promise I’m not gonna, like, pop them or…?”

He cringes again. “Well, I really hope not.”

Richie’s voice cracks up half an octave. “Oh, good! No pressure.”

“Yes, I just said, don’t apply pressure,” Eddie says, which makes Richie laugh a little nervously. The next thing Eddie knows, there’s a faint scratch on his back and he startles.

Richie whips his hand away immediately, like only with three feet of distance between it and Eddie’s body can it be trusted. “Did that hurt?”

“No, you just didn’t warn me.” He adjusts his grip on the towel—his fingers ache from behind held in one position for so long—and on the edge of the sink. Then he draws in a breath, feeling his ribs expand.

“Did you or did you not ask me to help you?” Richie demands.

“This is _not_ my fault.”

_“What fault?”_

Eddie ignores him. Barring any truly massive fuckups, which anyway can’t compare to the experience of being impaled by a demon clown, this shouldn’t be so bad. He stares down at Richie’s dry toothbrush. “Okay, go ahead.”

“Sir, yes, sir,” Richie quips, scratching again at the corner of the bandage. Eddie can feel when he gets a corner of it because the little scratch stops and Richie adjusts how he holds his arm. Eddie can feel the adhesive pulled taut against his skin. “So when you say Band-Aid—”

“Don’t just yank it off,” Eddie says. “Careful over the stitches, then once you’re clear, just pull really fast.”

“ _That’s_ what I needed to know,” Richie says, carefully peeling at the top of the bandage. “The stitches I’m not allowed to look at?”

“Yes.”

“Why?

“Just don’t, all right?”

Richie scratches delicately at the opposite corner of the bandage now. Eddie’s so itchy all the time, it’s like torment. If Richie would just sink his nails into his back and drag them down, he thinks he would just dissolve over the sink.

Or maybe Richie would step in just a little bit closer and press up against him. Soft fabric of his t-shirt against Eddie’s side, hipbone pressing into Eddie’s flank high up on his thigh. Warm.

Richie puts on a vaguely mystical dialect, voice dropping low. “Your wish is my command.”

Peeling the bandage away from the stitches feels terrible. Not painful, really, or at least not pain that’s anything more than an irritant. Getting the suction cups from the heart monitor off his chest was so bad that Eddie yelped every time he got one free; this is just weird— _it’s not weird if you don’t make it weird!_ —and worse he can hear the adhesive slowly yielding its grip on his skin.

“Roger, we are clear for takeoff,” Richie says, which makes Eddie blink. “Ready?”

He spreads his feet a little to brace himself and his left foot collides with Richie’s toes. Neither of them make any effort to move away. Eddie is thinking— _takeoff? as in bandage takeoff?_ —and getting slowly madder and madder the funnier he finds it.

“Ready.”

Richie pulls. There is a shocking absence of pain, his nerve endings reeling as his brain processes the tearing sound that cuts through the little room. Eddie gasps more as a way to fill the void and looks back up at Richie’s reflection in the mirror.

Richie’s eyes are wide and his face is classic _I fucked up_. Eddie waits for him to say _Oh, sorry, you’re geysering blood back here_ , but instead Richie asks, “Was that okay? Did that hurt? I’m not looking.”

Eddie’s skin feels cold now in the stinging wake of the bandage. He blinks once, relieved, and then nods. “Didn’t hurt.”

Richie visibly relaxes, shoulders slumping a little as he sinks deeper in the slouch he uses to stay at Eddie’s eye level. Eddie doubts it’s even conscious, really—Richie’s back has got to be killing him, and he’s pretty sure if the stoop were on purpose Richie would have complained about how Eddie being short is bad for his spine or something.

“Oh, good, I was waiting for it to start, like—” He gestures his index finger wildly and makes short hissing sounds, indicating arterial spray hitting him in the face.

Eddie snorts. “It’s fine. That’s good, I’m good now. Thanks.”

“Right.” Richie looks down, not to Eddie’s back as he fears, but to the bandage still hanging from his fingers.

Eddie lunges for it immediately. “Don’t look!” He’s supposed to check it for fluid and the like, and make note of colors and smells, and he does _not_ want Richie making any observations. He turns so that his back is to the door instead of to Richie and—

Richie is somehow closer than Eddie realized, despite standing within range of touching him. Eddie gets hold of the used bandage and whips it out of Richie’s hand—disaster averted?—and then becomes very aware of the towel between them.

Because Eddie’s half-naked. And his fingers, tired of clutching at the towel in the same position for so long, are practically screaming. And Richie is close enough to eclipse the door into the wetroom entirely, broad shoulders blocking that exit, seeming to take up twice as much space because of his duplicate in the mirror to the right. Richie’s no longer using the mirror to make eye contact with Eddie, instead staring straight down into his face. Somehow eye contact without the intermediary feels _unadulterated_ in comparison, like the intensity doubles. The chill of the small room reminds him of the hospital and Richie is close enough that Eddie can feel the warmth he’s putting off, like a force field around him: _just one step nearer._ And Richie just looks him in the eye.

Eddie opens his mouth to say something, hesitates, and then closes it again.

Richie asks, “Can you get the one on your chest?”

His breath is sleep-bitter when he speaks, and it helps Eddie to remember he’s on a mission here.

“Yeah,” Eddie says, and takes half a step back. The end of the towel sways against his legs. He can also get the one under his arm from where his intercostal drain went, it was just that one, and now they can be done with this.

Richie doesn’t move. “Do you need to put the bandage back on when you’re done?”

“Uh, not sure yet,” Eddie manages, unwilling to admit that that’s dependent on the fluid on the bandage, which he will not be inspecting until Richie leaves.

“Okay.” Richie takes a step back into the doorway, looking just as weirdly hesitant as Eddie feels, and Eddie has no idea why. “If you do—I’ll be out here, then.” He steps backward into the wet room, then seems to become aware how ridiculous what he’s doing is and brings his arms up to wave in front of him mysteriously as he walks backwards out of the bathroom. He closes the door and everything.

Eddie stands there, then gives up and throws the towel down onto the countertop. What the fuck was that? What the _actual_ fuck was that?

_Take your shower_ , his survival instincts remind him ruthlessly.

* * *

When it comes to water pressure, the hotel showerhead errs on the side of “trying to power wash your useless man nipples straight off your body.” Eddie checks this before he gets in, having the foresight that blasting his injuries directly with a firehose might be bad for them. He adjusts the showerhead so that it’s pointing high instead of at his body, then curses to himself when his ribs inform him that he has exceeded his allotted range of motion.

It doesn’t stop him from outright moaning once he gets under the hot water. The spray drums on the back of his skull and he tips his head back into it so it soaks the crown of his head and wets his hair down. Hot water runs down the back of his neck and his shoulders. It’s warm. He feels _warm_ for the first time since the hospital.

Showers are not places for indulgence, in Eddie’s world. In the fifth grade Eddie brought home a permission slip for a presentation which Sonia promptly refused to sign, and Eddie was the only child sitting by himself absently playing with yarn and doodling on his notebook, and then Bill, Stan, and Richie came back and Richie practically leaped into Eddie’s lap and asked _Did you not go because you don’t have a DICK, Eddie?_ at top volume, which meant that Richie had to take a different note home to have his parents sign. But almost immediately after that Sonia sat him down and explained to him calmly that he was getting big now—those were the words she used, _getting big_ , not _growing up_ or _getting older_ —and that meant he was vulnerable to certain kinds of illnesses he hadn’t been before, and that if he was going to take a shower he had to strictly time it so that he didn’t catch a chill.

(To this day, Eddie does not know why his mother thought he would be less inclined to jerk off in the bathtub than in the shower. Maybe she was relying on his natural revulsion at the idea of stewing in his own semen. Maybe as far as she was concerned baths were for babies and if her baby was in a bath nothing like that would even occur to him.)

Bill, blushing, and Stan, clinically, explained to him what he missed in the presentation anyway, and Richie made up a lot of stuff that Stan quietly disabused Eddie of by showing him a book his parents had given him. Then Bill stole a romance novel from a locked chest in his mother’s closet and they all bent their heads over that, Eddie dealing with fascination and revulsion, and later he went home and kind of idly tried one of the things described and accidentally discovered masturbation on his bedroom floor when he should have been sleeping. But the one thing that never changed is that Eddie learned how to take military showers—wet the whole body, step out of the spray, lather up, and rinse. Eddie is fairly certain that if he had gone so far as to turn off the water while he was soaping his mother would have been pleased by his strict practicality.

And showering every morning was part of his careful routine in New York, too—wake up, go jogging, shower, get ready for work, drive to work. The cardio dragged his heart rate kicking and screaming into something approaching wakefulness; the shower was the most energizing thing he did all day. He missed that while he was in the hospital—the conscious awareness that his brain was coming online, that he was coming into his faculties.

The water clears his head like it hasn’t in weeks. He has to squeeze his little travel bottles of face wash, shampoo, and conditioner with his left hand because his right hand doesn’t have the grip strength, but it’s fine. He has to tilt his head down to wash the hair at the crown of his head, and then tilt all the way back to guide his hands up the back of his neck, but it feels really good. He closes his eyes and opens his mouth and lets suds run over his face. He can taste it, just a little on his lips, bitter and clean.

The hospital recommended a certain kind of scentless soap to wash his injuries with, and also warned him not to go sticking his fingers in the hole in his chest. It’s basically an antibacterial hand soap, which means it comes with a pump; he squirts some of the orange stuff into his palms and then carefully cleans across his stitches, around the edges of his injury. He can’t get the stitches on his back so well—and he wishes he had a scrubber of some kind, because his shoulders also broke out while he was in the hospital banned from bathing—but he feels pretty okay about it. He does not inspect the shower curtain for mold; he does not think about Richie’s scalp massage or the little hotel-brand soaps and shampoos in here that Richie has clearly been using or the stray strands of black hair abandoned in the corners of the tub; he just cleans up and then tilts his head back again and lets the water run over him.

He should get out and get ready for breakfast; they’re saying goodbye to Mike before he sets off on his road trip of the national parks.

Just a little longer, though.

He’s in there long enough that his fingers prune, and isn’t that interesting to see when it’s not because he’s been scrubbing? He thinks he read something somewhere about it being an evolutionary advantage, giving humans a better grip on things when their hands are wet. Eddie thinks that’s interesting— _here is one more thing your body knows how to do without you. Here is one thing you can trust your body to do on its own. Just for you._

When he gets out he pats his surgical sites carefully with the towel and then leaves them to air dry, which means wandering around naked in the bathroom and bedroom for a little bit as he rubs down his hair and legs. He sees that Richie left another shirt for him folded on the TV unit and shuffles around taking his pain meds, putting on clean underwear, applying moisturizer to the part of his face unencumbered by beard before he inspects it.

When he does, he demands out loud, “Oh, what the fuck, Richie?”

Richie in the next room starts laughing, which makes Eddie, mostly naked, both self-conscious and incensed at once. He starts to dress, putting on pants and socks and shoes before he goes for the shirt. He puts it on because he has to and he buttons it up to his throat, and then he storms out to confront Richie.

Richie is still hanging out in the long-sleeved t-shirt and boxers, clearly waiting for his turn in the shower because Eddie took a full fifteen minutes, and he looks nothing short of gleeful when Eddie walks out, which means he did this on purpose.

“Look,” Richie says between guffaws. “I just kind of threw everything in my duffel, you should be glad I have this many shirts to choose from. It’s that one or we’re gonna have to go buy you shirts until I can get to a laundromat.”

* * *

So it’s Richie’s fault that Eddie joins the Losers for breakfast wearing a shirt patterned with little skulls. He wrangles his old white zip-up hoodie over it and tries not to sulk, because he’s determined not to let this get in the way of being clean at last. Given the choice between wearing a dirty shirt or wearing this shirt, he’s going to have to stick with the skulls, but he feels like he’s really leaning hard into the whole mid-life crisis thing. Like the next thing he should do is go out and get a lip piercing.

Bev, also perpetually dressed in black and white, appraises him when he sits down. “Your hair looks so good!” she says.

Fluffy, is what Eddie’s hair looks like. He hardly even minds, despite that normally he has to tame it down before work. He sits down heavily at the table, braces his elbows on it, and holds his chin in his hands. He feels content enough he could go back to sleep. Quiet, in a way.

“Have a good morning?” Bev asks. Ben is sitting beside her, tracing around the rim of his coffee cup with his finger.

“That was the best shower I have had in my whole life,” Eddie says.

Richie looks around at him, expression dubious. “Now I feel weird about using it after you.”

Bev snorts and Eddie swats absently at Richie but not with any real intent to maim.

“You look nice,” Ben says earnestly.

“I like the shirt,” Bev says.

Eddie pulls a face.

When Mike comes down to the restaurant to join them—immediately visible over the partition celebrating their table from the rest of the restaurant, just because he’s so tall—he slides into the booth beside Eddie, drops one of those reusable grocery bags onto the bench beside him, and then considers Eddie’s chest.

“It’s Richie’s shirt,” Eddie says defensively, just to get that out there. Eddie does not own this shirt. Eddie is not responsible for this shirt.

Mike nods, mouth twisting up contemplatively. “I knew him, Horatio. A fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy.”

Eddie went to business school, but at least he recognizes that Mike is definitely quoting. The others around the table—artist, artist, and theater kid—are all focused on him, watching.

“He hath borne me on his back a thousand times,” Mike recites. “Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now? Your gambols? Your songs? Your flashes of merriment that were wont to set the table on a roar?”

“I’ll show you some gambols,” Richie says, and Bev reaches out and puts her hand over the back of his and hushes him.

“Not one now to mock your own grinning? Quite chapfallen? Now get you to my lady’s chamber and tell her to this favor she must come.” Mike smiles, his teeth very white. “Make her laugh at that,” he says, his voice warm.

In the silence following, Ben begins quietly applauding, a careful golf-clap in the restaurant.

Richie says, “Jesus fucking Christ, Mike, can you pick a fucking comedy?” He pulls his hand out from under Bev’s and thunks his elbows down onto the table so that all the silverware rattles.

Bev shoves Richie’s shoulder and says, “It’s his goodbye brunch, he can quote whatever Shakespeare he wants.”

“I don’t think that’s a thing,” Richie says. “I’ve never heard that rule before. And it’s all of our goodbye brunch.”

But it’s not, really, because Mike is leaving the group again and going off to do other things, and the four of them are trucking out to New York by one way or another. Eddie feels a little pang at the idea, some faint stirring of guilt—Mike has been alone for so long and now he’s going off to be alone again?

“What else can you do?” Ben asks, staring at Mike in open admiration.

Half of Mike’s face scrunches up in a wink. “Thus have I, Wall, my part discharged so. And, being done, thus Wall away doth go.”

Ben blinks. “Holy shit, Mike.”

Richie covers his face with both hands and peeps through his fingers. “I’m not cultured enough for this group.”

Eddie, feeling the odd one out, kicks him under the table. “You recognized it.”

“Everyone knows ‘Alas, poor Yorick’!” Richie says, surprisingly defensive. “It’s not weird!”

Eddie did not know that was _Alas, poor Yorick_. “He didn’t say, ‘Alas, poor Yorick’! Otherwise I would have known what the fuck he was talking about!”

“It’s the only thing you say to a skull!”

“That’s ‘to be or not to be’!”

“What did you think he was talking about, Eddie?” Bev asks.

Eddie feels something shift unsteadily in his stomach—not nausea, but a distinct feeling of _I’m being made fun of, but I don’t know how_. It’s been a long time since he felt like that—he’s spent most of his adult life cultivating the kind of persona that means his coworkers would never do that in front of him, and he didn’t expect to hear it from Bev.

Mike says, “So I have a gift for you.”

Eddie looks around at him and is somehow surprised when Mike is looking back at him instead of at anyone else at the table. “Me?”

“Yes,” Mike says.

Which is when Eddie remembers that he still has Mike’s mittens. He goes digging for them in his pockets, but they’re in his jacket, not in his zip-up sweatshirt. “I have your gloves,” he says. “Don’t leave, I have your gloves, I can go get them.”

“No,” Richie says loudly, “ _I’ll_ go get them, because I am your manservant and you are stoned.” He makes to get up from the table, completely ignoring the waiter approaching their table and looking bewildered.

“You can keep them,” Mike says.

Eddie stares at him. “No, I can’t. You have arthritis.”

“You can,” Mike says. “I’m good. That’s not your present.”

Eddie, flabbergasted at the idea of there being more, opens and closes his mouth like a fish. Mike grins and turns to the bag on the bench beside them.

“Where’s my present?” Richie demands.

“I’m sorry, did you die?” Mike asks without looking up.

Richie gives a weird barking laugh and settles in his chair again, apparently no longer willing to run and grab Mike’s gloves since Mike has formally bequeathed them. Eddie doesn’t push him on it only because he feels weird about sending Richie to fetch things for him.

Mike sets a shiny metal bottle down on the table in front of Eddie. “So this is a water bottle,” he says. “Very tight lid, no leaks, so that you can keep hydrating like it’s your job.”

“It is my job,” Eddie says almost automatically—which is better than announcing to the table that he has a urinary tract infection.

Mike smiles and his whole face scrunches up when he does it, looking genuinely pleased at Eddie’s joke. “And this—” He sets a thermos down on the table next to the water bottle. “Is the best thermos I’ve ever found. They had them at the camping store and I thought, Eddie needs one of these. I get up and I put my coffee in it at four-thirty, and it’s still hot when I drink it at two.”

“Why are you up at four-thirty?” Bev asks.

Richie asks, “Why don’t you drink your coffee for nine and a half hours?”

“Library-in’ ain’t easy,” Mike replies. “So. They need to be washed, but they’re dishwasher safe. Do not microwave them.”

“I would not microwave them, they are clearly made of metal,” Eddie says, tapping at the water bottle with a fingernail so it dings.

“I was talking to Richie.”

“Babe, I am a microwaving expert,” Richie says. “Nobody eats more TV dinners than me.”

Eddie pulls a face. Partially at the idea of Richie nuking Hungry Man meals sadly in Los Angeles—which does not fit in at all with his concept of Richie’s celebrity lifestyle but seems perfectly on-brand for the boy he once knew in Derry—and partially at Richie casually calling Mike ‘babe.’

“Thanks, Mike,” he says, and then, uncomfortable, rushes on into, “Hey, what’s the deal with microwaves?”

There is silence for a long moment, and then Richie repeats in a loud theatrical voice, “ _Hey, what’s the deal with microwaves?_ Because if I’m looking to _make waves_ —” Accompanied, of course, by some obscene rocking in his chair. “—I’m serving _yottas_ at the least.”

“Jesus Christ,” says Mike under his breath, and then looks up at the ceiling as though to apologize to God Himself. Ben frowns and takes out his phone.

“Because there’s all this _hoo, radiation is bad for you, microwaves leak, blah blah blah,_ and I am just getting a sense of perspective, and also I can’t cook so I’m gonna be stuck with him—” Eddie jerks his thumb at Richie, appealing to Ben, Mike, and Beverly as reasonable human beings. “—and if Richie gives me cancer I’m gonna be pissed.”

Ben reports, “Yotta is the metric prefix for ten to the twenty-fourth power. Unfortunately, it checks out.” He sets his phone down. “Microwaves are not dangerous.”

“If I’m gonna give you cancer, at least it’s gonna be one of the fun ones,” Richie mutters.

That Eddie can’t ignore, turning to stare at him in horror. “What the fuck could that _possibly_ mean?”

Richie just grins.

“Even if microwaves were dangerous, a leaking microwave doesn’t produce nearly enough radiation to damage a human,” Ben says.

Eddie takes a few deep breaths to let that process and, mercifully, the waiter appears in the lull in the conversation. He does not need to go look that up. Ben is extremely trustworthy. He makes good sandwiches. Eddie is okay with the idea of putting his safety in Ben’s hands, indirect as it is.

He orders an eggs Benedict, even though egg yolks are very dangerous materials. It’s the American government’s fault. Not enough evidence that salmonella vaccines are effective, Eddie’s entire ass. He’s gonna fight the whole Food and Drug Administration barehanded. He killed a demon alien; why the fuck not? He’s actually a little angry about it, as he eats his benedict, scowling.

“Honey, is your breakfast okay?” Bev asks.

“It’s delicious. I wanna kill the government,” Eddie says.

Richie presses his palm to his mouth and looks at Eddie, clearly smiling.

_“What?”_ Eddie snaps.

“No, Eds, go on. The treason is cute.”

“I am not _cute_ and _I bet Bill’s having safe British eggs right now_ , because they _vaccinate their fucking chickens_.”

He’s never had hollandaise sauce before. It’s very rich. It’s delicious. He can’t finish it because his stomach is so shrunken thanks to his time in the hospital and all of his meds. He does shake out two Dramamine pills onto the table and hork them down with cold water. They’re chalky and start dissolving the instant they hit his tongue, and they’re bitter and disgusting. Eddie tries to get the taste out of his mouth first by drinking more water, and then by resting his fork in the sauce from the Benedict and then sucking it clean.

A number of text alerts go off around their table. Bev checks her phone. “Bill says he’s not eating eggs right now, but that someone on the set keeps pushing ‘egg mayo sandwiches’ at him.”

“That sounds disgusting,” Eddie says, which is how he knows he’ll end up trying it if he ever visits Bill in England.

“I think it’s just egg salad,” Bev says.

“Disgusting,” Eddie repeats.

“Do you want a hot chocolate?” Mike asks.

They drink hot chocolates. Midway through his Eddie feels suddenly as though he’s been struck over the head and says, “Whoa,” as the Dramamine kicks in.

“All right?” Mike asks over his mug.

Eddie nods, feeling faintly lightheaded. “Dramamine. Sleepy.”

“Guess we’ll split soon, then,” Mike says.

“The breaking of the fellowship,” Richie says mournfully.

“Nah,” says Ben. “You have my axe.”

Everyone contemplates whether Ben is the Gimli of the group. Eddie waits for the conversation to turn to Richie calling him a hobbit, because it will, and leans his forehead against Mike’s upper arm. Mike doesn’t seem to mind, continuing to sip his hot chocolate.

“Don’t get lonely,” Eddie instructs him in an undertone. “Don’t allow yourself to get lonely. The second you think you’re getting lonely, you need to come find us, all right?”

“All right,” Mike replies, voice warm with his smile.

* * *

“What the hell is that?” Eddie demands.

He has a limitation on how much weight he’s allowed to lift, because of the hole in his torso. So Ben and Bev came up to their hotel suite and Bev chatted with him while Richie and Ben hauled both Eddie’s suitcases and Richie’s duffel down to the car. Eddie was expecting the douchey rental car that Richie showed up to the Jade of the Orient in.

Instead it’s a Subaru. Eddie did not realize that was the vehicle they were heading towards until Richie hit the unlock button on his keyfob and Eddie heard all the doors click and looked around like the car pulled a gun on him.

“Yeah,” Richie says, casually throwing a peace sign. “Came with free Birkenstocks. Also the government has me on record as a lesbian now.”

“What the fuck?” Eddie demands. Drug-induced sleepiness means he doesn’t have the stamina to really get into this issue, despite it being a _big thing he absolutely needs to get into_. He’s carrying his own electric blanket—folded, like an adult this time, instead of wearing it like a cape. “Where the hell did you get that?”

“Bought it,” Richie replies calmly.

“You—” Eddie sways and has to brace himself on the Subaru. “You bought—you _bought_ a car?”

“Yeah.” Richie yanks open the driver’s door and climbs in, which means that Eddie has to climb in to continue arguing with him.

“You just—you just went out and bought a car?” Eddie demands. “When?” Surely not while Eddie was in the hospital, or he wouldn’t have borrowed Mike’s truck to pick him up. There have been gaps of time over the last couple of days where Richie went into Bangor to do things and Eddie either slept or hung out on Ben and Bev’s couch, but Richie has not mentioned a car.

“I dunno, before Stan left,” Richie says. “I made him come with me.”

“You just bought a car. You took _Stan_ and you bought a car.”

“Yeah, he drove me.” Richie indicates the center console. “Do you want your seat warmer on, or?”

“No!” Eddie snaps at him, because he’s perfectly capable of turning on a seat warmer himself and also he’s not allowed to sweat and if he gets cold (and he’s always cold, that’s part of why being in the shower this morning was so great) he has a blanket literally on his lap right now. “Why did you buy a car?”

“Because I couldn’t take the rental to New York.”

“I—” Eddie feels like he can’t even see straight. “You just went to a dealership and bought a car for the _convenience_.”

“I mean, it’s used,” Richie says. “But it’s in pretty good condition, I think. You can look at the CarFax if you want.”

“You—” His chest is collapsing in on itself. He leans back against his seat and takes some deep breaths.

Richie seems completely unbothered by this, putting the key in the ignition and turning the engine over so the Subaru rolls to life under them. Then he waves at Ben on the other side of the parking lot. “Can you get your seatbelt?”

“Yes.” This car is not as tall as Mike’s, and the seatbelt is about level with Eddie’s ear. He reaches for it with his left arm and buckles up without it being too agonizing. He adjusts the folded stack of the blanket on his lap. “I can’t believe you just bought a car. You didn’t have anything to trade in.”

“I paid cash,” Richie says.

“You did _what_?”

“I only had about nine thousand, I had to go used,” Richie says. Eddie’s mouth opens at _nine thousand dollars_ and does not close. “But the salesman agreed it was in pretty good condition, here.” He holds his phone out to Eddie so Eddie can inspect the CarFax report for the vehicle. There is one record of work done on it to repair damage to the rear right quadrant of the body, but no record of an accident, and Eddie didn’t notice anything weird about the back of the car when he was approaching it. “We had it detailed and everything, but it was pretty clean when I did the test drive, too.”

“I—you—” Eddie’s body can’t hold this kind of stress. He can feel sleep coming over him like a curtain. He’s not passing out, he’s just having some kind of nap attack. He points a finger at Richie. “I’m gonna fall asleep, because I’m stoned, but we’re gonna talk about this when I wake up, all right?”

“Oh, counting on it,” Richie says, smirking a little. He takes his phone back, plugs it into the auxiliary cord, and pulls up Spotify. “If I play music will it keep you up?”

Even the sheer force of Eddie’s rage cannot keep him awake right now. “No. Just don’t play, like, heavy metal and I should be fine.”

“Easy listening for Eds, got it.”

What comes on is definitely “I’m Ready” by Fats Domino. Eddie, remembering vividly watching Gizmo the mogwai dance to this in the theater with Richie, slowly turns toward Richie with his eyes wide open and murderous. Richie says nothing but flutters his eyelashes at him expectantly, waiting for him to comment. Eddie turns back to face front.

Bev and Ben are watching them instead of getting into Ben’s car. From the smile on Bev’s face, she knows they’re arguing. Eddie waves at her and she waves back. Silver is visible tucked into the trunk behind her head. Richie waves at her and begins forming a complicated series of hand gestures, at which Eddie tilts his head all the way back in the seat and closes his eyes.

He’s out before they even hit the highway. Apparently nothing beats the way truly bone-deep relief relaxes your system, and Eddie can’t remember ever being as relieved as he is to put Maine behind him.

He doesn’t know how long it takes, but he wakes up later because Richie is singing. Jackson Browne is playing on the iPhone, melancholy and smooth; and Richie is singing along, but unlike Richie normally singing, where he matches every note and intonation of the singer—a perfect mimic as always—he seems to be spilling over every line. His voice drives. It pitches flat and sharp in different places—not always, just often enough to be noticeable.

He’s not singing along. He’s just singing. _“While the veterans dream of the fight, fast asleep at the traffic light.”_

Eddie doesn’t know why, but he closes his eyes again, shy about being caught observing this moment in a way he wasn’t shy about catching him talking to himself in the hospital room. If Richie had just been mimicking, he wouldn’t be shy at all. This, though, sounds like he’s catching Richie in the middle of something deeply personal. Richie honest, instead of performing.

_“And the children solemnly wait for the ice cream vendor.”_

Eddie thinks, _We’re both_. Some of the urgency of his drugged sleep has melted away a little with the foggy comfortable time he lost, but he can still hear with his ears and see the strange ghosts tossed up by his dreaming brain—Eddie in maybe the third grade, sneaking out the screen door on a summer day while his mother napped in the front room in front of the TV—closing the door so quietly! He oiled it himself earlier in the week—and Richie and Stan and Bill holding Silver waiting for him outside, Richie sucking down a Tweety Bird ice cream with the gumball eyes and holding an unopened Screwball in the other hand for Eddie.

Richie’s voice slows down and mellows, luxurious, stretching out the words, and it reminds Eddie of nothing so much as _can you teach me how to dance real slow_.

_“Out into the coo—oo—ool of the evening strollllllls the Pretender,”_ Richie sings. Buttery as sundown in the summer, walking almost deserted streets, picking over the curbs and running his thumb over the new hardening scabs on his legs, scratching his mosquito bites raw, grass so green it made Eddie ache. _“He knows that all his hopes and dreams begin and end there.”_

There’s pressure in Eddie’s chest and the first thing he thinks is the habitual _Oh shit, asthma attack_ , but it’s too low down. It’s not a breathing problem with his chest, it’s crushing pain, almost like heartburn, behind his wound. He waits for the surge of panic that should rightfully accompany it, the realization that he should have gone back to the hospital like Richie was urging—but then it releases. Like someone stuck a hand in his chest and squeezed his heart, just once.

Richie goes on singing: _“I’m gonna find myself a boy who can show me what laughter means,”_ and Eddie understands all at once, with the weight of a coin dropping into a wishing well, that it’s not his injury. It’s Richie. It’s just fucking Richie, it’s Eddie being stupidly in love with Richie, this is what being in love feels like.

Eddie realizes he’s going to kiss him. Not right now—he’s still drugged to the gills and half-asleep and Richie is operating a motor vehicle—but it’s going to happen. He can feel it coming like planets sliding into alignment: slow, inevitable, the collision course. His heart gives a second smaller pang at the idea; there’s a sharp ache in his mouth under his tongue. Soon.

Soon.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Links: [Richie's skull shirt that Eddie borrows](https://www.macys.com/shop/product/inc-mens-sketched-skull-shirt-created-for-macys?ID=6573980&CategoryID=20627), Richie's out of clean shirts now so hopefully my partner can stop asking me if I'm shopping for Sims when I have the same page open on Macy's for days.
> 
> You can find me at my fandom tumblr tthael or on twitter @ifithollers.
> 
> Update:
> 
> [fluffy and scruffy Eds](https://twitter.com/cytakigawa/status/1254096230550065155) post-shower by [@cytakigawa](https://twitter.com/cytakigawa)
> 
> [Eddie in Richie's skull shirt](https://twitter.com/eduardokaspa/status/1252831648116178944) by [@eduardokaspa](https://twitter.com/eduardokaspa) on Twitter


	10. My Little Bleeder

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Richie and Eddie sit in a box for five hours on their way back to childhood. Eddie makes some culinary choices; Richie picks a fight and gains new self-understanding.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi! Thank you for your patience; this chapter kept fighting me.
> 
> Content warnings: mention of _Stripes_ ; Richie makes jokes in poor taste, as per usual; I am not sponsored by Spotify, nor by the creator of "Songs that Never Fail to Make White People Beyond Turnt"; Final Pam was released in 2015 so that's fine; orthorexic thoughts; mentions of _Super Size Me_ , _The Jungle_ , and cannibalism; not enough men wash their hands; I am not sponsored by Cinnabon, nor Sensodyne; I lived in Boston for 7 years, I'm allowed to be a dick about Boston drivers; brief reference to _Greater Boston_ ; medical malpractice is not a joke; mention of deaths of a parent (Will Hanlon, Zack Denbrough); _Gremlins_ ; mentions of dental procedures (wisdom tooth removal, Eddie's stab wound is inspected, teeth pulling); one (1) Ted Cruz joke; discussions of canonical bullying (Richie) and insufficient support; canonical murder (Henry Bowers's dad whose name I currently forget; Georgie Denbrough; Bowers himself); canonical assault (Bowers on Eddie); discussion of drug interactions; mention cancer, cancer survival, and remission; mention of surgery; discussion of tattoos; Went deliberately describes dental procedures to upset Richie; mention of needles; mention of vomiting; reference to cocaine and heroin; scarring; insensitive jokes about pandering/procuring; the old biddies of Thirsty Thursday don't respect Wentworth's bodily autonomy.
> 
> Okay, I know that was a lot, it's not actually as dark as all that but some of the dental stuff can be kind of squicky so be safe. It's not described in-detail or onscreen, but sometimes I wish I didn't ask my cousin the dentist questions.

Eddie wakes up and he’s warm. Not hot, not sweaty, nothing that’s gonna make him anxious about his incisions or his injuries. When he glances down he sees that Richie didn’t flick the seat warmer on while he was out (Eddie would yell at him for that; he said no already), and the electric blanket is folded on his lap, more puff than actual protection from the elements. The sun’s coming in through the window. Part of his brain begins to panic, trying to assess whether he can feel that reflective glow coming off his skin telling him he’s going to have a sunburn, whether you can get sunburned through a car window. He should know that by now, right? He should know whether you can get sunburned through a car window. But he can feel the sun on the back of his hands, on the side of his neck, cooking warm through the sleeves of his hoodie, sinking down into his bones.

He’s clean. He’s… comfortable. That’s what this is. This is comfort. And he’s in a car with Richie Tozier, and he’s heading out of Maine.

“Good morning, sunshine!” Richie singsongs. Only when he turns down the volume on the speaker does Eddie realize that the music he’s listening to is—dear god—“Doo Wah Diddy Diddy.”

“What the fuck, Richie?” Eddie demands.

“You’ll have to be more specific,” Richie says, voice lapsing down into the serious and clinical. “There are so many objectionable things about what I am and what I do.”

He blinks a couple of times and his vision fogs over; he’s definitely dehydrated. He blinks again, trying to clear it, and grabs the bottle of water in the cupholder. It’s unopened. He doesn’t remember putting it there. He braces the bottle between his thighs and cracks the cap with his left hand. “ _Stripes_ ,” he says, and drinks.

Richie cackles. “Well, you’re awake. I was having to entertain myself, and I can’t do that the way I usually do, I’m operating a motor vehicle—” Eddie’s tired, but it’s Richie, he gets the joke; the illustrative pump of his hand is completely unnecessary.

Eddie swallows a mouthful of bottled water and says, “Jesus Christ.”

“So here we are,” Richie carries on doggedly, unencumbered by Eddie’s exaggerated disgust.

“I’m pretty sure that would be a crime.” They’re in a Subaru. They’re pretty low to the ground. People in tall vehicles—like, truckers, could see in. Truckers don’t want to see Richie’s dick.

The fact that it’s the very pinnacle of unsafe driving goes without saying, of course. This is all hypothetical.

“Yeah, can you see me _not_ doing it?” Richie asks. His smirk looks like it’s out of control; one corner of his mouth is twitching a little. There’s something almost like a dimple tucked into his nasolabial crease, indentations within indentations. Eddie can see his crooked tooth from here.

Eddie tilts his head all the way back against the seat and sighs. “I’ve changed my mind. I want to ride with Ben.”

“Too late!” Richie crows. “Everyone wants to ride with Ben, but you’re trapped. There are childproof locks on the doors and everything.”

This offends Eddie almost more than the implication that Richie would jerk off while operating a moving car. “I’m not a _child_.”

Richie makes a noncommittal noise in his throat. “Uh, you’re short like one.”

Eddie flounders for an insult related to Richie’s appearance, because his brain is torn between _five-nine is the average height in the world_ and _holy shit Richie is built like a rectangle, what am I supposed to make fun of about that?_ He swallows and says pointedly, “You look like you emptied the chamber of a vacuum cleaner and glued what you found to your head.”

Richie’s cackling scales up into a shriek of laughter. Eddie immediately gets concerned that he’s the one operating the car. When they were kids Eddie always knew when he’d gotten off a good one because Richie would go boneless with his hysteria, and often silent. Depending on who was misfortunate enough to be within reach he would slump onto them, trying to hold himself up and, with the inevitability of someone drowning trying to clasp onto their rescuer, drag them down onto the ground with him. They had all been that person at one time or another—Bill, good-natured and tolerant, letting Richie sprawl across him; Stan, snapping _Oh no you don’t, get off me,_ and shoving Richie away and Richie, too limp to press his point, would lie there heaped on his own limbs like a leafpile in fall; or Eddie, saying _No! No! Richie! Not again! Richie!_ and Richie would fall on him with the weight of a collapsing skyscraper and pin him and Eddie would shriek at him and beat at him with the sides of his fists and kick, and Richie would laugh harder, seemingly unable to draw breath, until Eddie thought Richie was dying on top of him and made Bill drag him out by the wrists.

“I’m quitting my job,” Richie says, wiping at his eyes. “You be the comedian.”

“Absolutely not,” Eddie says. He closes his eyes again, though not because he’s tired. He screws the cap back on the bottle without looking, just because having any kind of open bottle in a moving car makes him nervous. The fingers of his right hand feel numb, but he holds the plastic cap between his knuckles and rotates it in place. “I have self-respect.”

“Do you?” Richie asks. “That’s new.”

And fuck him for that, since everything Eddie’s done since he’s woken up has been about walking the fine line of self-respect. Self-respect while coming out, self-respect while another man carries him to the bathroom, self-respect while choking down pills. Richie _knows_ how much this bothers him.

Eddie, without thinking twice about it, reaches out and thumps Richie across the upper arm. The backs of his hand hits Richie in the bicep; his fingers hit just the edge of Richie’s chest. It’s completely automatic, a relic of an age where engaging with Richie just meant a certain amount of grappling—Richie folding his arms around Eddie’s shoulders, leaning on him, driving his knuckles into Eddie’s scalp, picking him up off his feet, wrapping his arms around Eddie’s knees and making Eddie collapse to the ground. Eddie opens his eyes and looks at his hand with surprise. He’s forty years old. He doesn’t think he’s struck anyone— _anyone_ —since he entered the adult world.

But he’s not an adult, really, when he’s with Richie, is he? He’s an adult overlaid with the seven-year-old boy who met this kid with giant eyes behind his glasses on the playground.

Where is Eddie? When is he?

Richie is still laughing. “You’re here in a car with me,” he says, answering at least one of the questions without knowing. “How much self-respect can you have?”

Some of Eddie’s ire stills and fades. It wasn’t a dig on him in the first place—of course, of course, Richie knows where to cut where it’ll hurt, but he’s never maliciously cruel. Insensitive, sure, but he’s not gonna actually try to humiliate Eddie. And everything that Richie says comes back around to self-deprecation eventually. As if Eddie would actually drop Richie and hop into the backseat of Ben’s car, and sleep the ten hours to New York. As if a secret guilty part of him isn’t thrilled just to have the excuse to sit next to him.

Eddie rolls his eyes and says none of what he’s thinking except, “Where are we?”

“Still in Maine,” Richie says apologetically. “You were only out for about an hour.”

Eddie turns to focus on the road signs. I-95 is regrettably familiar, though he’s glad to be heading south on it this time. “295 coming up?” he asks Richie.

“I forgot you did that,” Richie murmurs, almost under his breath. At a normal volume, before Eddie can ask what that’s supposed to mean, he says, “Yeah, any minute now.” He yawns as though bored. “I’m fading, switch the playlist.”

“What?”

“Playlist,” Richie repeats. “Look for ‘Songs That Never Fail to Make White People Beyond Turnt.’”

Eddie says again, “What?” for completely different reasons.

Richie lets his tone pitch into whiney. “Come on, Eddie, I’m driving responsibly, I need the energy boost.”

Eddie picks up Richie’s phone from its awkward perch under the dashboard and looks at the GPS app. There’s a little banner underneath the live map that shows what’s playing on Spotify; “Doo Wah Diddy Diddy” has shifted to a song called “I Like It” that Eddie doesn’t recognize. He taps on the banner and he gets a warning about operating a phone while driving, to which he hits the _I’m a passenger_ button (as though the app has any way of verifying that) and enters in Richie’s passcode. The playlist that’s currently running is titled “Girlfriend in a Coma.”

“Oh my _god_ , Richie, are you still hung up on fucking Morrisey?” Eddie demands.

He remembers that from the 1988 school year—the Smiths had just broken up, and none of them had any idea what to say to Bill—at forty, Eddie still doesn’t know what to say to someone whose brother has just been murdered, so how could he have been expected to know at twelve?—and half the time they were too afraid to go to the Denbrough house and see Georgie’s room in its perfect timeless preservation. The rest of them had minded Georgie less than Bill had, it seemed, and every one of them remembered in vivid detail all the times Bill had said _Go away, Juh-Georgie!_ and Georgie shouted back _I’m gonna tell Mom!_ and ran back to the house, and then the kid was dead. Kids were dead all the time in Derry; kids were missing; but Bill was broken up, and none of them knew how to be broken up then. Richie seemed to be trying it out, that year, lying on the floor in Eddie’s room with his hands folded behind his head, the volume turned all the way up on his Walkman so Morrisey played tinny through the headphones. _And you’ll never see your home again/ Oh Manchester, so much to answer for._

Inexplicably, Richie says in a deep metallic Voice, “ _How your backyard barbecue going, the Smiths? Pretty good, it doesn’t seem.”_

“What the fuck?” Eddie asks, and Richie breaks out of the Voice and gives a full belly-laugh that fills up the car the way a mushroom cloud balloons into the air and then expands.

He clicks out of the playlist and looks at the array that Richie has available, genuinely curious. Growing up he always figured that Richie had his finger on the pulse of everything music—he talked about staying up recording things off the radio—and then they met Mike and Mike knew all about rock and roll. Between Mike’s height and his effortless grin and his wisdom and the way he looked at Bill Denbrough like he understood him, Eddie used to wonder what would have happened if Mike went to their school with them, if he’d have had the patience for their little pack. Richie was cool, but Richie was just cool to them, cool in a secret way that belonged to Eddie, in a way that snuck up on them over the course of years; Mike was cool from the beginning, and Eddie was a little jealous of him, a little jealous of the way he and Richie were always passing tapes back and forth. Getting to look at Richie’s playlists now feels a little bit like opening a vault—even if he is a grown man who voluntarily listens to “Doo Wah Diddy Diddy.”

Richie’s playlists are inscrutable from their titles. “Girlfriend in a Coma.” “Into the Ocean.” “SMOOTH.” “Weepinbell.” “Metal Sound.” “Mail Goblin.” “Freezer Tetris.” “Do This Anymore.” “Real Quick.” “A Bit of a Reputation.” “Not a Good Person…” “Skeleton You Are…” Eddie can’t even credit these to song names. One is just titled “Valentina Tereshkova.”

“Is that the first woman in space?” Eddie asks, thrown.

“Who?” Richie asks.

“Valentina Tereshkova?”

“ _Prost_ ,” Richie says, cracking down into a Russian accent.

More. “He Doesn’t Look a…” “Stop Lying.” “Thankful for Spiders,” and what appears to be its sequel, “Thankful for Knorr Pasta Sides.” “Here for the Cheddar.”

“What cheddar?” Eddie asks.

“I had a gig in Vermont,” Richie says.

Eddie stares at him. “What happens in Vermont?”

“Cheese,” Richie replies, as though it’s obvious. “Of the cheddar variety.”

“Fire On The Mountain.” “I have to tell you a…” “Phlebotomy.”

“That’s what I play when I have a blood draw!” Richie says brightly, seeing Eddie linger on this last. Eddie opens it up and sees that it is all, indeed, puns on hearts, blood, and variations thereon. “Drops of Jupiter” is on there, as is “Big Girls Don’t Cry (Personal)” by Fergie.

“Is this what you listened to while you were donating me blood?” Eddie asks.

“Yes,” Richie says, “and then I started crying along to Herman’s Hermits, and Bev took my phone away.”

Eddie has no idea how seriously to take that claim. “You are a nightmare person,” he says, instead of saying _Thank you for your blood and also for saving my life_. “And you are forty. I’m pretty sure you are legally banned from saying ‘turnt.’”

“I didn’t make that one,” Richie admits. “I found it online. Come on, it’s full of road trip staples.”

“Road trip staples?” Eddie asks, skeptical, and when he opens up the playlist he sees that the first track on it is Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believing.” “Oh no.”

“Eddie,” Richie says.

“No, no, no.”

“Eddie,” Richie wheedles.

“No!”

_“Eddie,”_ Richie whines.

* * *

Twenty minutes later, Eddie is surprised to learn that he does know the song “All the Small Things” by blink-182, just because he only recognizes the chorus. Eddie doesn’t have enough breath in his body to sing along, but he doesn’t mind Richie bellowing along, and he gives it his best shot. He’s never been the best singer anyway.

* * *

They stop at a rest area in New Hampshire, because it’s about time for lunch. While the Dramamine means that Eddie isn’t hungry, he suspects that if they wait for him to get hungry before they stop and eat something, Richie will be ready to resort to cannibalism by the time that they get to his parents’ house.

Eddie feels no input from his innards at all—no nausea in his head, his throat, his stomach, his bowels—and this is such a pleasantly alien sensation that he immediately gets anxious about his dependence on pills again. He told Bill to throw them all out for a reason. He has ibuprofen, Tylenol, and his painkillers and antibiotics. He also has a powder laxative he’s supposed to mix into his beverages at mealtimes, but so far he’s been able to avoid the indignity of having to do that in front of other people. The texture makes him think he’s drinking, like, those silica packets you get when buying a new suitcase, melted on a stove.

He stresses a little bit, once he’s out of the rest area bathroom, considering his options. He’s dependent on Richie to buy his lunch (and his dinner, and his breakfast tomorrow, and in fact every meal until he can sit down in front of a computer and work out what’s going on with his bank, because he does not believe that a prepaid cell phone is a secure method of organizing one’s finances), and he’s tempted to just tell Richie to buy two of whatever he’s getting, eliminating the pressure of choice. Then he stares from the Starbucks to the McDonalds to the Popeye’s to the Sbarro. Sbarro is a safe choice, right? Eddie could just have a slice of pizza and call it a day. He’s trying to broaden his horizons, but he doesn’t think he’s ready to try eating red meat from a fast food place; he and Myra watched _Super Size Me_ once upon a time and, while he read many criticisms about the misrepresentation of the scientific method done in that film, it all kind of blended together with what little he remembers of Upton Sinclair’s _The Jungle_ from college. He is unable to differentiate between his reasonable health concerns about fast food and his intrusive thoughts that some of the meat in his burger might be human.

He’s trying to get over his hypochondria. Replacing it with a phobia of accidental cannibalism will not improve his mental health.

Hands come down on his shoulders and he startles; he can smell the artificial cherry scent of the pink soap from the men’s room. He almost tilts his head back in relief at confirmation that Richie washes his hands—it’s not that he thought Richie _didn’t_ wash his hands, but Myra talks about her past in foodservice sometimes, explaining how washing hands after shaking hands with men is standard protocol, and Eddie immediately adopted that as another reason not to touch other men more than he had to shake hands in a business setting.

He does tilt his head all the way back to look up at Richie, reminded of the way Richie would just grab him in high school, trying to startle him. “Uh-uh,” he says calmly at Richie’s broad smile. _No dice._ Eddie has lived through the most terrifying thing a human being (seven human beings) can live through. Richie’s gonna have to try fucking harder, or bust out the psychological horror, or threaten Eddie with a Big Mac if he wants to get a reaction out of him.

Richie puts on an exaggerated pout and then sticks just the tip of his tongue out at Eddie, a childish gesture curiously understated considering Richie’s usual showmanship. Eddie’s entire body flushes hot and he looks straight ahead, staring at the line for Starbucks.

Should he decide where he’s eating based on line length? That would be practical, right? And his stomach has shrunken that maybe he just wants something small. He’s trying to make serious decisions here, all right? What’s Richie distracting him for?

“Hey,” Richie says.

Eddie does not tilt his head back to look up at him again; it would feel too much like baring his throat. “What?” he demands.

Richie’s hands, still on Eddie’s shoulders (big, touching his collarbone, almost touching the side of his neck, what the fuck does he need such big hands for _do not think of possible answers to that_ ), slide down and tighten on Eddie’s sleeves, and then he physically turns Eddie in place. Eddie goes along with it for reasons he can’t articulate, except that it was always easy to let Richie manhandle him when they were kids, because Richie was immune to Eddie’s reprimanding slapping hands, and Eddie is obviously regressing.

Eddie twists his head to try to get a read on what Richie’s doing from his face. Richie is hunkered down into the perpetual stoop he has when interacting with Eddie, trying to get at his level. There’s an almost manic look behind his eyes, the same excitement with which he spat back _Fuck you!_ at the restaurant in Derry, the joy of falling back into a comfortable pattern like a well-worn pair of shoes; and the twist of his mouth is almost triumphant.

He brings Eddie to a standstill and leans down so his chin is on Eddie’s shoulder, and Eddie leans his head back so Richie’s not quite so in his face, bewildered, before he thinks to look in the direction Richie has pointed him.

It’s a Cinnabon.

Eddie makes a little involuntary noise deep in his throat.

Richie loses it completely, nearly falling over; he tries to steady himself on Eddie but Eddie hisses a little at the sudden weight and Richie lets him go almost immediately, reaching out to brace himself on one of the little square tables. Eddie blushes for reasons he doesn’t fully understand as innocent passersby look around at the crazy man yukking his head off in the rest area.

“Stop it!” Eddie hisses. “Shut up! Stop!”

Richie has tilted forward and is clutching at his own chest and seems to be trying to get his breath back. “Oh my _god_ ,” he gasps. “So I know what you’re having.”

“I’m supposed to have protein,” Eddie hisses. He wants to fold his arms over his chest but he’s leery about putting pressure on his surgical site; he’s about due for another dose of painkillers and he’s trying not to make it angry.

“I will buy you protein bars,” Richie says. “I will get you a thing of protein powder and one of those gallon tanks of water and you can lick at it like a little hamster all the way to my parents’ place, but you have to eat a cinnamon bun. You have to.”

Eddie, who has previously been a big believer in supplementing one’s diet with the vitamins and nutrients necessary, is now accustomed to swilling powder laxative mixed with bottled spring water out of a hotel coffee cup in the middle of the night when no one is there to see his shame.

“Protein powder is disgusting,” he says, a hard stance he has never felt the urge to take before despite his affinity for hard stances.

“So not that,” Richie says. “I’ll go out into the wilds of the greater Boston area and bring you back a cow you can eat raw, I do not care. Tell me you do not want a cinnamon bun.”

“Uh,” Eddie says.

Richie grins at him.

“I shouldn’t,” Eddie says.

Richie grins wider.

* * *

The cinnamon bun is so huge that Eddie has serious concerns about his ability to finish it on his shrunken stomach—or worse, what if he _does_ finish it and it exceeds his stomach capacity but he can’t tell because of the Dramamine and he throws up without warning in Richie’s new car? He unwinds it very slowly and eats carefully, remembering Bubble Tape. Richie brought it to school one day and Eddie—who never got junk food or things from the check-out display at the grocery store because his mother had opinions on what was healthy for young boys—got very excited, because usually when Richie brought a treat to school he was willing to share, until Richie opened up the big plastic puck it came in and revealed he had taken a bite out of the side of the roll. _You can have a piece,_ Richie told him, grinning widely, like he expected to turn down the segment of tape marked by Richie’s teeth marks, Richie’s saliva. Eddie glared at him and took two strips, looking at the odd flat shape of his incisors and how it had crushed the gum in the middle of the wheel.

Richie also gets a cinnamon bun, just aggravating Eddie’s feelings of _we are apparently not adults after all_. And to make it even worse, he’s ignoring it in favor of scrolling through his phone, his glasses pulled low on his nose, his chin tilting his head down, holding the phone up high in front of his face so he can see it. Eddie remembers seeing press photos of Princess Diana; Richie is absolutely Princess Diana-ing at his phone right now. If Richie’s taking photos of himself Eddie’s going to mock him within an inch of his life.

“Okay, so Maggie’s texting me,” Richie says.

This does not surprise Eddie, since they’re going to Maggie Tozier’s house.

God, is Eddie going to have to call Richie’s mother by her first name _to her face_? Is he going to have to interact with her and accept that she’s opening her home to him in his hour of need, _knowing_ that in a dire and extremely inappropriate moment he said to Richie _I fucked your mother_? Is Eddie going to have to meet the Toziers for the first time as an adult with a serious injury, a horrible itchy beard, a still-healing cheek wound, _wearing their son’s clothes?_

Is it too late for Eddie to shave and buy a suit and pretend he’s _Edward Kaspbrak speaking_ again? He never had any problem calling Myra’s mother Judith. It was how she introduced herself. She fed him chicken-noodle soup and told him how nice it was to finally meet one of Myra’s boyfriends, which made Myra blanch but say nothing. Later she explained to Eddie (furiously kicking off her shoes and flinging them across the apartment) that there were no other boyfriends and Judith knew it and this was all her being a passive-aggressive bitch who always moved the goalposts as soon as Myra came in sight of them.

God. Not only does Myra probably hate him, he’s kind of anxious about how her family’s taking the news. Not because he cares about them as people—Myra was frequently enraged by her mother, her much older sister, a niece who’s an evangelical Gnostic Christian; and Eddie of course had no desire to talk about Sonia, so they had a real self-contained relationship that slowly began stifling the life out of Eddie—but because Eddie cut and ran, and who does Myra have if not him?

Fuck, he’s going to have to call her.

“So do you want to get dinner on the road?” Richie asks him. “Because we’ll probably get there around like four, so we can either eat at old man standard time, or my parents can—” His voice drops into a Voice, inexplicably low and hoarse: “— _start making a casserole. Does Eddie like chicken? Which of your little friends was the one who wouldn’t eat chicken?_ ”

Oh _fuck_ Richie’s parents want to cook for him? And Eddie hates chicken—or more appropriately, the chicken farming industry. He hates Big Chicken.

“No,” Eddie says immediately. “Do not—do not let your parents cook for me. Listen. Look at me.”

Instead of putting the phone down Richie moves it to the side like a slide transition and stares up at Eddie from under his short black eyelashes. Eddie reconsiders his life choices, momentarily stunned.

He fumbles back to his intended purpose. “Do not let your parents cook for me,” he says. “Do not. Not today. Not tomorrow. No.”

Richie grins suddenly, his face going soft under the glasses, his eyes big and black. Something wrenches in Eddie’s chest. “Guess I’ll tell Maggie you hate her cooking,” he says, raising his phone again, eyes going half-lidded again as he focuses on the screen.

“That’s not what I said! That’s not what I said!” Eddie grabs for the phone with his icing-sticky fingers, and Richie laughs and holds his wrist in the air, twisting in his chair to play keep-away. “They didn’t invite me, they’re not allowed to put themselves out for me, _do not let them cook for me._ ”

Once he gets Richie to concede (smirking, “okay, okay”), the cinnamon bun is really good. He can only manage about three quarters, but he saves the last small central whorl of the roll in the little box container. It’s always the softest, sweetest, best part.

* * *

Richie turns the music off basically as soon as they cross the Massachusetts state line. Eddie, who has been getting more and more nervous since they entered New Hampshire, is secretly a little relieved. Richie’s not a terrible driver, but once the Massholes enter the arena he chokes up on the wheel and sits up straight for once in his life. He hates Priuses, is appropriately impatient with minivans, and cusses out an Audi A4 that deliberately drives at a pace to prevent him from switching lanes. At one point he mutters, “Oh, Corolla,” and inclines his head in a way that makes Eddie think he’s about to thump it on the steering wheel, just giving up.

The closer they get to the city, the closer bumpers get. It’s after three PM on a Tuesday; their Subaru has it a little bit easier than everyone trying to _exit_ the city on their approach, but when they cut sideways around Worcester (which Richie says loudly every time he sees a sign for it, all too much enthusiasm: _“WUSS-TAH!”_ ) they get stuck in the rest of the corporate rush. Eddie starts stomping on his imaginary brake and contemplates taking another Dramamine, just while they’re here, to knock himself out through the state of Massachusetts. Then he decides that would fall under the umbrella of “abusing medications for other than their intended purpose” and is, regrettably, out of the question.

Actually Richie doesn’t do terribly. Eddie has high standards for driving, and the fact that he was recently in a car accident while driving while talking on the phone has not changed that at all. He isn’t sure how Los Angeles traffic compares to New York traffic, but he’s certainly of the opinion that Boston traffic is entirely lawless; that people make up lanes where they don’t exist; that instead of waiting their turn like every other motherfucker in this city they try to bend their cars like they’re trying to bend bullets in that movie with Angelina Jolie and _somehow_ it all seems to work. Eddie is furious about Boston drivers both on behalf of the city of New York and the laws of physics.

Richie says nothing but he grits his teeth and leans forward in his seat and occasionally mutters extremely uncreative insults to himself. Eddie watches the little muscle pulsing near the corner of his jaw and eventually becomes aware of a smell very much like hot metal. At first he assumes that this used car that Richie paid cash for is about to catch fire, Eddie should have bothered him more about the car when he got in, he should have, _he should have_.

Then he realizes that it’s Richie. This is Richie stress-sweating. He has a certain _smell_.

Eddie’s body, surprisingly, has no input on whether a sweaty metal-smelling Richie is more or less appealing than a cool space-invading leather-smelling one, because it is too busy involuntarily clenching his hands on his electric blanket and his Cinnabon container and sliding his feet into the corners of his footwell, looking for pedals. Eddie’s brain decides it’s a good time to stop thinking about Richie’s jaw muscle and just to tilt his head back and recount the reasons he’s glad he’s alive, and not think about getting into an accident in the Greater Boston Area or the awkward phone call he’s going to have to make to his wife sooner rather than later or how he’s avoiding checking his email because he’s afraid that Erika fired him in his admittedly unexcused absence or whether Richie’s parents are going to assume Richie has brought a vagabond with him. Thinking about Richie sweating makes Eddie worry that he might start sweating, so he turns up the air conditioner and points all the passenger vents more effectively at himself, and Richie says nothing as the temperature in the car slowly trends toward the sub-arctic.

When they get clear Richie’s mouth opens and he sighs and slumps back a little in his chair, and then he glances at Eddie. “We made it!” he says, and then does a double-take, looking at Eddie for a longer moment, and then starts laughing.

“Eyes on the road!” Eddie snaps at him. “What?”

“Oh my god, you look like I took you on a rollercoaster,” Richie says. “You have crazy hair and everything.”

Eddie, well-aware of his hair’s tendency to become fluffy when it’s clean, self-consciously pushes his fingers through it. “Fuck off,” he says. “I can’t believe you bought a _red_ car. Don’t you know they get stopped more than any other car? _Combined?_ ” He can’t actually remember if the _combined_ statistic is true, but he knows that red cars are stopped most frequently by police.

“Nobody actually gets stopped for traffic offenses in Massachusetts,” Richie says.

“That is not true,” Eddie says hypocritically.

“It is true. As long as your car doesn’t touch another car, it’s the wild wild west out here, and you don’t wanna see my hand where my hip be at.”

Richie reaches out and punches the power button for the speakers, and they wait for a few moments while the system tries to identify the aux cord. Eddie watches the screen, watching it flick one by one through sources before landing on _AUDIO CD_ and then spitting out a track number.

“Did you bring CDs to Derry?” Eddie asks, just making sure.

Richie glances at him and then at the screen in a neatly-executed double take. “No,” he says.

The speakers warble, _“Advances in Geriatric Medicine: Disk Three of Eight.”_

Eddie bursts out laughing. Richie bypasses laughter and goes immediately into silent convulsions, his hands tightening on the steering wheel like it’s a life raft, his head sinking down as he strains to keep his eyes on the road while also doing his _can’t contain the hilarity of the situation and also remain upright_ routine.

“I guess now we know why your used car was in such good shape,” Eddie says.

Richie gasps, “Text Stan. Text Stan right now.” He draws in a breath and then says airlessly, “Oh my god what’s that doctor going to do when he realizes he’s missing a whole _twelve-point-five percent_ of the latest advances in geriatric medicine.”

It’s not funny. It’s not funny at all. “Kill one in eight patients,” Eddie replies seriously, and waits.

Richie, clinging to the steering wheel, grinning so hard it looks like his teeth have to hurt, squints and blinks as his eyes water. “I’m driving. I’m driving,” he begs, his voice all _have mercy_.

“But he’s in geriatric medicine, so no one will notice,” Eddie portends ominously. It’s not a Voice; but if he were to do a Voice, which he isn’t, he’d be going a little bit for spooky fortune teller. “It’s our duty to listen to this CD so that we can save them.”

Richie howls and slams the power button for the speakers. “Put on the fucking music, I don’t wanna spend any more of your nine lives. Fuck.”

* * *

Trees line the highway. Eddie has never driven on Connecticut-66 before, but it’s activating old parts of his brain the way that driving into Derry did that first time. Here are towns you can drive through. Here is a little narrow pizza place with an inaccessible parking lot. Richie’s no longer even bothering to follow the GPS; he knows where he’s going.

“How often do you come see your parents?” Eddie murmurs. He doesn’t know why he’s getting so quiet, but something about the gray and green of the surroundings makes him feel like coming home from church on Sundays, knowing that if he’s quiet and he eats his lunch his mother will fall asleep in front of the TV and he can escape out to the Barrens. Something about the safety of the woods, so close by.

“I’ve been here like twice since they moved,” Richie says, frowning. “And that was, like…” His brow furrows hard, squinting at the road like he’s doing the math in his head. “Oh fuck, ’95?”

“Really?” Eddie asks. He’s trying to remember when they actually left Derry. Eddie went off to college the fall after he graduated high school, so that has to be something; and he knows that the Denbroughs left before that, sold the house and moved on and Eddie never heard from his old best friend again until he walked into the Jade and saw Bill in front of the fish tank. When was that? Ben was gone long before that, he did high school somewhere else; and Bev, after the whole thing with her dad, Eddie’s pretty sure she became a ward of the state or moved in with an aunt or something. But Eddie doesn’t remember the last time he saw Richie.

He decides to stop pushing that particular mental bruise. He’s afraid to know the last time he saw Richie. The last things they said to each other. Whether they cried.

The man in question has a faraway kind of look in his eyes now they’ve relaxed. “Christ, yeah,” he says. “I’m pretty sure it was ’95. Fuckin’ shit.”

He turns onto Connecticut-85 and drives. Trees. Eddie looks at them—big old stands of pines, dark green as though to spite the turning of the seasons. It makes him think of Mike out in Yellowstone to see the changing of the leaves; Mike was always there, to the very last moment. Mike’s dad got sick in their very last years of high school, when Eddie was eighteen and hiding his scholarship applications from his mother, and Mike was walking around as volatile as he’d ever been, unlike himself, and Eddie didn’t know what to do. He’d lost a dad at three; what did he know? Ben lost a dad in Vietnam, but he wasn’t there to consult. And—Zack Denbrough had died, Eddie remembers suddenly with startling clarity; that was why the Denbroughs had left, just Bill and Sharon in the end. Just a boy and his mother.

Richie slows and hits his turn signal. There’s an old movie rental place up on the left, with its windows boarded shut but the film reel art around the crest of the building still vivid. Eddie thinks of B-movies again, of _Gremlins_. Behind that lot there’s a grocery store; Eddie automatically turns his head to look at the sign as Richie guides the car past that particular turn. A bank. A dental office.

“Is that your dad’s place?” Eddie asks. “I mean— _was_ that your dad’s place?”

“God, for a while, yeah,” Richie says. There’s a big window sticker of an anthropomorphized tooth and toothbrush that’s visible even from here. The name on it now is—

“Is that _Dr. Molere_?” Eddie asks, incredulous.

“Yep.” Richie pops the P; it makes Eddie think of Greta Keene snapping her bubble gum.

“Did you know about this?”

“No, I didn’t fucking know about this, don’t you think I would have made the Dr. Molere joke already?”

“Your dad got replaced by a Dr. Molar.”

“Serves him right for all the wisdom teeth he yanked. Someday the tooth fairy will do all our jobs, Eddie, and we will be slaves in the bicuspid mines.”

Eddie cringes reflexively, imagining the thump of the pick like something out of _Snow White and the Seven Dwarves_. He knew that whatever Dr. Tozier did during dental examinations, it wasn’t all counting his teeth and congratulating children on growing the full set, but he always managed to close his eyes when that sharp little metal implement came out. Eddie knew that if he made a fuss, his mother (in the chair in the corner, fanning desperately at herself with a trifold handout) would make a bigger fuss, and Eddie didn’t want that, couldn’t afford the consequences.

They drive on. It’s a series of narrow residential streets beyond that, all the families served by the long strip of a grocery store. A white picket fence comes up on the left, but it doesn’t bracket a house, it brackets a round pond full of weeds. There’s an old-fashioned white archway with a metal gate in front of it, but there’s a padlock hanging on it. He doesn’t know why but he shivers and tucks his hands under the electric blanket.

“You good?” Richie asks him. “You can fuck around with the AC if you want, I don’t care.”

“How far are we?”

“Like three streets.”

Eddie will make it.

At some point Richie mutters, “Fuck, I think it’s this one” and turns left onto another residential street. Then he says, “Yeah, this is it, they still have the goddamn deer. Look.”

Up on the right, toward the very end of the road before it vanishes into the woods, is a big square planter box. Eddie can’t see what’s growing there, but he sees two small deer standing very still beside the mailbox, and as they draw closer he realizes from their stillness that they are statues. He wonders if the Toziers got very into lawn art from 1995 onwards, but Richie makes no move to guide the car into the driveway of that particular house, and Eddie realizes they’re driving into the woods.

Not so far, though. Richie turns right just after the deer, after a narrow strip of pine trees separating the standard suburban cookie-cutter house from… what Eddie strongly suspects to be Richie’s parent’s house. There’s a big outbuilding garage straight up ahead from this narrow path, and on the left is a massive lawn.

“Richie,” Eddie says. “Do your parents keep _bees_?” Because there are two bee boxes there, standing on either side of a tall garden planter. Wire trellises stand empty of tomatoes.

“Yeah,” Richie says, and then starts laughing. “Hey, do you remember how you said you had birth control you were saving for my sister? Because Went and Maggie went out and got like a hundred and twenty thousand of them, go stick your dick in that hive.”

“Fuck you!” Eddie says automatically.

The gravel driveway is long and well clear of the bees. As they creep up toward the garage, a gray-haired man creeps out from behind the house, his arms wrapped protectively around his chest.

_Holy shit,_ Eddie thinks, because he understands suddenly what Richie’s going to look like at seventy.

He has no real memories of what Wentworth Tozier looked like when Eddie was a kid, but now Eddie can see the similarities between him and the man Richie grew to be. Dr. Tozier’s face is thinner, more rectangular to Richie’s square, and a little rounded in the face and cheeks from fat. Ruddy, almost, though that could be from cold. The hair on the top of his head has mostly given up, but on the sides it’s pale gray and kept very neatly. He’s barefoot, wearing sweatpants and a navy T-shirt, and his glasses are very like Richie’s except for how thin and rounded the wire frames are. But he has the same slashing brows, the same chin and jaw. The same inexplicable height.

Richie parks the car and rolls the window down. “The fuck are you doing out here? Don’t you have, like, Minnetonkas or something?”

“Ah yes,” Dr. Tozier says, and Eddie startles at how hard it is to hear him over the muted sound of the engine, because his voice is hoarse, hoarser even than you expect from an old man. Exactly as hoarse, in fact, as the Voice Richie did at the rest area. “The kind of respect I come to expect from my son, throwing himself on me for sanctuary.”

Richie grins and tilts his voice up into something Eddie finds old and familiar. “I brought my laundry. Can Eddie stay over?” He cuts the engine.

In the sudden quiet, Dr. Tozier leans forward a little. He doesn’t step onto the gravel, but he does peer into the car to look at Eddie. “Edward Kaspbrak,” he says, and Eddie’s almost startled to hear his full name out of the man’s mouth. “Well, you look just the same. What’s with the beard?”

Eddie resists the urge to cover his own face with his hands. “Your son kidnapped me. Please call the FBI.”

Richie snorts and gets out of the car. He and Dr. Tozier exchange a perfunctory hug, Richie uncharacteristically careful as though his dad is fragile, Dr. Tozier with no such compunctions, slapping Richie on the back. Eddie, awkwardly, unbuckles his seatbelt and climbs out, leaving his electric blanket and his square little Cinnabon box on his seat. When Dr. Tozier straightens he’s almost of a height with his son, and Eddie realizes with a shock that there’s a hole at the base of Dr. Tozier’s throat with a little plastic device in it. He’d guess that at some point Dr. Tozier had a tracheotomy.

When Dr. Tozier turns to Eddie, he covers the hole with a fingertip. “They don’t take my calls anymore, they just assume I’m using a vocoder. Last time I tried to report on what Richie was doing I was almost framed for the Zodiac killings, so.” He shrugs.

“I hear they got Ted Cruz for that,” Richie says.

Dr. Tozier snorts, and when he does that he looks and sounds identical to Richie. “That’s right.” He tilts his head toward the house; Eddie realizes he’s standing not on grass, but on a path of round stepping stones set in the yard. “Come on in.”

Eddie looks to Richie and Richie jams his hands deep in his jacket pockets before following his father. Eddie follows his lead. Dr. Tozier leads them up to a back porch with multiple stories, up four stairs, and into the back door.

“The front’s swollen shut,” he says. “Weather. We finally got central air, though.”

“Oh, just in time for October?” Richie asks.

“Couple years ago, wiseass,” Dr. Tozier says. He holds the door open and calls inside, “Maggie my love, I’ve brought you a gift.”

Richie blanches as he steps in onto a thick wool weather mat, and Eddie looks at him sharply but Richie doesn’t seem to notice.

“Are you regifting after forty years?” Mrs. Tozier asks, coming into the kitchen. “Did you labor thirty-six hours for it too? Hi, Richie.” Eddie’s startled by how tall she is; he knows that when he was a kid all adults looked tall, but Mrs. Tozier must be at least five-eight, standing eye level with him. She leans around Richie and grins at him. “Eddie Kaspbrak, don’t you look just the same.” She holds her arms out.

“Eddie’s had surgery, Ma, don’t break him,” Richie says, and Eddie’s inexplicably relieved to hear him call her by anything other than her first name.

“I’m fine,” Eddie snipes back.

Mrs. Tozier immediately raises her arms and clasps the back of Eddie’s head instead of his torso. She presses her temple to his and then lets him go; Eddie looks at Richie in something like alarm, but Richie has gone tight-lipped and pale. Mrs. Tozier holds Eddie at arm’s length, inspecting him. “The beard is new,” she allows.

“That’s what I said!” Dr. Tozier says, closing the door behind him.

“That’s not what you said,” Richie says immediately.

Eddie wonders if he should apologize for his facial hair. He should have just bought a Conair trimmer or something at the drugstore—now that he’s confronted with the consequences, he can only think of all the non-blade options available to him.

“Can’t hear you,” Dr. Tozier says without missing a beat. “Enunciate, Richard.”

“Enunciate this,” Richie suggests, and flips his dad off. Eddie is _horrified_ , ready to grab Richie by the sleeve and drag him out to the car, apologize for bothering the Toziers, call Ben and explain that they’ll get there around nine or ten, maybe.

“I’ve missed you,” Dr. Tozier says seriously. “Who else can I rely on for wit as precise as throwing a lump of fecal matter at someone?”

And Richie—laughs. A real laugh, too, one of Eddie’s laughs. He puts his hand on the door behind him and begins trying to toe out of his shoes instead of unlacing them like a reasonable person. Making himself comfortable. Eddie absolutely can’t bend over to unlace his new shoes, and he’s not going to ask Richie to do it for him, so he regretfully does the same. He hasn’t walked far enough in these to leave any stains or marks on the back of the fuzzy red material, he’s pretty sure, and sneakers are meant to be forgiving.

The kitchen is very white and very 1980s; all the appliances are black and glossy, and there’s a wall of glass bricks separating the glass-topped dining table in the corner from the next room. Eddie can hear music playing—Rod Stewart?—from deeper in the house.

“Eddie, you’re in the blue room,” Maggie says. “There’s a little step at the base of the stairs, will that be a problem?”

“No,” Eddie says. “One step’s fine.”

“I would put you in the purple room, but I can’t do the stairs with my knees,” she says, as though Eddie has a blueprint of the various rooms in the house and their advantages and disadvantages. “Richie, you’re in the basement.”

“The Richard Tozier suite,” Dr. Tozier quips, fingertip held to the base of his throat again.

“Does it have a bathroom yet?” Richie asks.

“No. Pee outside.”

Richie shakes his head, making a small _tch_ sound. “Not a suite then, old man. You got central air but not a bathroom?”

“You are welcome to use the storm doors should the urge take you in the night,” Dr. Tozier says. “Just remember not to piss into the wind.”

Mrs. Tozier shakes her head. “You’re in fine form tonight,” she says. “Eddie, I’ll show you your room. Do you have a suitcase?”

“Does he!” Richie says. Eddie feels inexplicably betrayed. Dragging two and a half suitcases into Mrs. Tozier’s house seems rude now. Eddie glares at him, and Richie holds up both hands. “I got it,” he says, turning back toward his abandoned shoes. “’Scuse me, Went.”

“I don’t need it right now,” Eddie says, feeling a surge of panic at the idea of being left alone in the house with Richie’s parents.

Richie shrugs as though it’s all the same to him. Mrs. Tozier waves a hand and beckons him out of the kitchen.

There’s a carpeted living room immediately behind the kitchen, the height of the room suddenly lifting up into loft ceilings. Eddie looks up at the lights.

Richie says what he’s thinking. “How do you change those bulbs?”

“Wait for my son to come home and put him to work,” Dr. Tozier says.

Mrs. Tozier is smiling. There’s a big leaf-patterned couch and, pressed up next to the stairs, an end table decorated with—

“No,” Eddie gasps automatically, leaning down slightly to inspect a picture of what is definitely baby Richie on Santa’s lap. His hair is bowl-cut but still flyaway, and his round glasses sit crooked on his face, which is so chubby-cheeked that it looks like his mouth won’t close properly, sitting there half-parted in a little goldfish pout. Eddie experiences a chest pain—a quick ache that fades almost immediately.

Richie leans over him to look at what he’s inspecting, then groans. “Ma, it’s September!” The frame has little dangling candy cane charms along the top. The Santa looks very authentic, actually, in his red velvet vest and with his gold wire-frame spectacles.

“You can decide how you decorate in your own home, Richard,” Mrs. Tozier says crisply. To Eddie she says, “There’s more where that came from.”

“Oh god,” says Richie.

“No god here,” Dr. Tozier intones. “Only Maggie May. You’re lucky we don’t have pictures from a _bris_ to show off.”

What is a _bris_? Eddie starts giggling a little hysterically, bracing his hand on his chest and standing up straight to do so. “Hang on, hang on,” he says quietly, and gets out his phone to snap a picture and send to the group chat. Then he turns to Maggie. “Okay, I’m ready.”

The blue room is so named because it is painted blue and has a nautical theme. There’s a row of white bookcases to the left, and Maggie says, “Here are more embarrassing photos of Richie. You might be in here somewhere, actually,” as she floats over to them. Eddie glances at what looks like a small mountain of pillows stacked on the bed—all white with navy patterns, one with a fish, another with an anchor, another with what looks like a pair of crossed oars—and then follows her.

There’s a tiny Richie from a pre-glasses era, apparently flattened into a leaf pile. One of his feet is elevated into the air, the grippy rubber sole of it clearly visible; Richie’s massive buck teeth are balanced on his lower lip as though he’s not sure about this whole thing. Eddie gets a picture of that too and feels his phone buzz as comments start coming in, but he’s watching Maggie _hmm_ around, inspecting. There are collections of books on the shelves—what looks like a complete set of Charles Dickens, a bunch of broad _Calvin & Hobbes_ collections stacked up behind a photo of a very small Richie standing next to a very ugly snowman, looking delighted. Maggie’s in this one, her hair dark brown and voluminous. When she smiles into the camera Eddie can see that her left eye does the thing that Richie’s does, crinkling further than the other. He gets a photo of that one.

“Oh, no, it’s just the cat,” Maggie says apologetically. “It was at one of your little friends’ birthday parties, I thought you might be there in the background. Here.” She taps what is admittedly a pretty good picture of Richie—before It, but after Eddie met him in the second grade, maybe ten if you split the difference—in a blue tie-dye shirt, looking up from under his eyelashes at the camera, what looks like a long white cat hanging over his shoulder.

Eddie takes a photo, something scratching at the back of his memory. He’s pretty sure that the Denbroughs didn’t have a cat. When he sends this one to the groupchat he asks, _Stan, was that your cat?_

“Who are you sending those to?” Maggie asks.

“Uh, Bill Denbrough and Stan Uris, actually,” Eddie says.

She smiles suddenly. “Yes, Richie said all of you got back together and had your own little reunion. I am sorry that you got hurt,” she says, glancing down at Eddie’s chest; Eddie guesses that Richie gave her the same spiel as the hospital but he decides not to respond in too much detail. He has a vague memory of showing up to Richie’s house to bring him homework from missed classes and being the reason that Richie’s parents figured out he’d skipped school. Maggie’s face pulls into a faintly doubtful grimace. “Doesn’t seem very… auspicious,” she says.

“You could say that,” Eddie concedes.

“Or,” Richie says brightly, looming in the doorway so that he takes up the whole space. He blocks the light coming in from the living room; he’s huge and dark and—casual, with the way he puts his elbow on the doorframe. His sock feet—

He’s wearing weed socks. They are bright yellow and decorated with green patterns of five-leaved weed plants. Eddie hates him again, a little.

Oblivious to Eddie’s rapidly shifting opinions, Richie goes on, “You could say that he was astronomically lucky. All the docs kept coming in and looking at him while he was asleep, it was fuckin’ weird.”

“Oh, Richie,” Maggie sighs. She looks around to Eddie. “So will this work?”

Eddie has several seconds where he does not understand what she means before he realizes she’s asking whether he’ll be comfortable in the room. “Oh,” he says, almost startled. “Yes, this is great, thank you so much.” He almost calls her Mrs. Tozier and thanks her for having him.

She smiles. “Good. Come on out here and tell us what you’re up to. Did you eat on the road? We were thinking about just ordering pizza.”

* * *

It is very difficult to conceal the sheer fuckery of what Eddie Kaspbrak is up to from Dr. and Mrs. Tozier. Eddie carefully deploys the understatement and more than once looks to Richie for help as he tries to engage without admitting to coming out or his impending divorce proceedings. Weirdly, neither of the Toziers ask if he’s gotten married; Eddie knows that Richie’s been texting with his mother but doesn’t know if Richie has warned them off asking any Myra-adjacent questions, or whether Richie would have the tact to do that in the first place.

At one point Eddie admits that he hates his beard and everyone in the room lets out a sigh of relief—except Richie, who starts cackling. His parents ignore him.

“It’s not that you couldn’t look nice in a beard,” Maggie hedges. “It’s just that it’s in a bit of an awkward state.”

“Like when Richie was sixteen,” Went adds. “Every time he talked it was like, ‘I’m sorry, I can’t hear you over the sound of your dirtbag mustache.’”

Richie snorts but looks unoffended by this reminiscing; as well he should, as a man who not only can grow an adequate beard, he has a five o’clock shadow by ten in the morning.

“I told you not to call it that,” Maggie says. “When you call it that, it’s child abuse.”

“Arrest me for emotionally belittling my dirtbag son,” Went says, which makes Richie chuckle more and lean back in his chair, like _let me have it._

Maggie, on the couch, is inspecting Richie’s face. “I know that facial hair is trendy these days,” she says doubtfully, “but you always look so nice clean-shaven, Richie.”

“Ma, I can’t be shaving like once every six hours,” Richie says. “It hurts my face.”

Went sits up and his hand flies to his throat in his eagerness. He and Richie chorus at the same time, “It’s killing me!” Then Went leans back in his big squashy armchair and says, “Not the most graceful setup.”

“It’s all about the enthusiasm,” Richie replies easily.

Eddie feels… trapped. Simultaneously on the spot and awkwardly tucked into the background in the light of the Toziers’ _enthusiasm._ “I, uh,” he begins, and then looks to Richie for help as to whether he should explain the whole _stabbed in the face_ thing to justify his terrible beard.

Richie seems to be on the same wavelength as him, because he crosses his legs in the his armchair and leans forward. “Hey, remember Henry Bowers?” he asks, voice suddenly loud and bright in exactly the way that Henry Bowers’s name never made people feel.

Maggie frowns. “Was that one of your school friends?”

“No,” Richie says, just as cheerful. “He was the kid who chased me all the way to Freese’s department store in the sixth grade because he and his friends were going to kill me. Him and—Victor Criss, do you remember him?”

“And why’d he chase you?” Went asks immediately.

Richie’s gaze flicks up contemplatively over his glasses and he bobs his head a little, contemplatively. “Because I called him Bananaheels when he wiped out in gym class.” The corner of his mouth draws up crooked, like he can’t decide whether the memory of the laugh he got was worth the immediate consequences.

Went sighs and adjusts his glasses with one hand, holding the other to his throat to speak. “Richie, you were always getting in fights. Which was weird, because you didn’t seem to be very good at them.”

“They outweighed us by like a hundred pounds,” Eddie offers quietly, looking down at his sock feet. The coffee table in the living room is also glass-topped, but it’s shaped like a cabinet, so the contents of the top drawer are on display. At the moment it’s just the green velvet lining, but Eddie watched Maggie pull leaf-patterned coasters out when she asked Eddie if he’d like something to drink.

“Which was weirder,” Went agrees, “because in all other aspects of your life, Richard, you were very intelligent, but in this one you seemed to fulfill Einstein’s definition of insanity.”

Richie’s face goes extremely still and—polite. That’s the word. Richie’s putting on a nice face, putting on a mask. Instead of picking at _all other aspects_ as Eddie expects him to, Richie puts on a storyteller kind of voice and goes on.

“So the day we graduated from eighth grade,” Richie says. “Bowers got held back _again_ , which makes sense, because he was dumb as, I dunno, a can of refried beans. And he decided it wasn’t his fault, he pinned it on the new kid in class who wouldn’t let him cheat off him, and that happened to be my buddy Ben Hanscom. Do you remember Ben?”

Maggie’s gaze has flicked up and to the side, but not in an eye-rolling way, in the way of someone searching for a memory. She shakes her head. “No.”

“He was the little round kid you could have fired out of a cannon,” Richie says drily, and mimes a massive stomach.

Eddie gets a strange impression of him holding court, what with the casual drape of his elbow over the back of the armchair, the splayed fold of his knees. Maggie sits on the couch adjacent to him, knees tucked tightly together and listening, and Went sits in his own armchair in much the same pose as Richie but with a skeptical eyebrow raised. They mirror each other—Richie’s right arm slung on the back of his chair, Went’s left. Eddie, opposite Maggie across the room on the loveseat, touches his knees a little closer together just to feel the bones come into contact for a moment, then relaxes.

“So Henry Bowers chases my friend Ben down after school lets out, and he and Belch Huggins—he’s the kid who liked to hold Eddie down and burp in his face, in case you don’t remember him—” Richie jerks his chin in Eddie’s direction and Eddie feels himself go tense with scrutiny and mortification, but Richie goes on. “—and Victor Criss—you know, you really should remember Victor Criss, he only broke my glasses three fuckin’ times—”

“And how many times did you break your glasses?” Wentworth asks, his tone low and flat as though everyone in the room should know the answer. “Richie, we love you, but when you were a kid nothing was your fault, even when you decided to shut your eyes and walk into a fireman’s pole.”

Eddie, who remembers that incident, winces.

“Oh, yeah, totally,” Richie says. “Hey, Went, out of curiosity, how many times did I break my glasses by punching myself in the face?”

Silence. Eddie, falling back into years of watching Richie wind Stan up until Stan finally exploded and ripped Richie to shreds, mentally awards one point to Tozier the younger.

Wentworth sits up a little bit and presses his fingertip to the little valve at the base of his throat. It’s called a stoma, he explained to Eddie; he had a complete laryngectomy ten years ago and he’s been in remission ever since. “Richard,” he says. There’s tiredness pressed into the downward slant of his eyelids, the prominent external fold. “You’re forty. You want to tell me why you’re getting all fired up over this?”

Richie pauses and then says, the arch tone gone out of his voice, “It will become clear as the story goes on.”

Wentworth’s eyebrows go up and he leans back in the chair, half a smile on his face as he indulges. He gestures with his free hand. “Then by all means, go on.”

Richie lets his arm slide off the back of the armchair and shrugs his shoulder a little bit, like he’s shaking something off. “So Henry Bowers decides to teach my friend Ben a lesson by taking his flick knife and carving his name into Ben’s stomach.”

Maggie gasps. “No, he didn’t,” she says quickly, swatting at the air like she can push the words physically away, as if Richie would lie about something like that.

“Oh yes he did,” Richie says just as fast, his timing _perfect_. “Ben was one of the ones I saw this morning in Derry, he’s driving right now but if I get him on the phone I’m sure Bev will take a picture of his goddamn abs and you can see the scar yourself. He only got as far as the H before Ben got away but it’s still there.”

Maggie’s eyes are wide but Wentworth has gone almost wooden-faced. Eddie presses his heels a little further into the carpet, bracing himself to see if Richie, at forty, is about to get reprimanded for talking back to his mother.

“Henry Bowers,” Wentworth repeats.

Richie nods, inclining his head, the corners of his mouth tucking up a little bit in something less than a smile but more than a grimace.

“The one who killed his father with a flick knife?” Wentworth asks.

Maggie covers her mouth with both hands, elbows tight to her sides as she draws in on herself. “Oh, god, and little Georgie Denbrough?”

Richie smiles, though it’s not funny, and puts his index finger in the air. “Ding ding ding,” he says. “Do I gotta ask why you remembered that one, Dad? Did all the dads in town get nervous?”

“I have seen you injure yourself on a fork and a frozen hamburger patty,” Went says. “If you were going to commit patricide, I was reasonably sure your clumsiness would give me a chance to escape.”

Richie does seem to find this genuinely funny, eyes scrunching up and everything as he chuckles. Eddie sits on the loveseat across the living room, gaze sometimes flicking to the TV unit with the old-fashioned speaker system. They’ve moved on from Rod Stewart. Eddie doesn’t know for certain who the current singer is but he’s pretty sure it’s Celine Dion. He remembers that scar—Richie coming into school with a bandage on either side of his hand and explaining he’d been trying to pull a frozen hamburger patty out of a pack of six, and punched the fork right through his hand in the process. Eddie was horrified at the possible thought of cross-contamination and had Richie down as _died of mad cow disease at ten_.

“Is that what you talked about?” Maggie asks, looking from Richie to Eddie. Eddie feels caught in a way by the aghast expression on her face. “You just all got together and hashed out growing up with a serial murderer?”

“Yes and no,” Richie says. “Because the thing I didn’t tell you over the phone, Maggie May, is that while we were in Derry having our little reunion, Henry Bowers escaped from the mental institution out by Shawshank—do you remember that?”

“Juniper Hill,” Wentworth says quietly.

“Yeah, that one,” Richie agrees. “And he decided that he was going to finish the job by killing my friend Mike Hanlon, because it’s not enough to grow up a serial killer, he had to be a _racist_ serial killer.”

Eddie is starting to feel lightheaded just sitting here drawing in breaths. He’s pretty sure Richie’s not about to confess to manslaughter in front of his parents, but the fact that he’s starting with Mike makes Eddie nervous. _Are you okay?_ Ben asked, and Richie turned around and said _No I’m not okay, I just killed a guy_.

“Mike stayed in Derry,” Richie says, seemingly suddenly aware that this backstory is necessary now. “Became a librarian. Figures. But.” He grimaces hard. “Bowers goes looking for Mike and happens to run across Eddie here first.” He indicates Eddie like an exhibit in court.

Maggie’s mouth is open. Quietly she says, “You said it was a collapsing building.”

“Oh Jesus,” Eddie says quickly, because he doesn’t want to have to explain to the Toziers that no, it’s not like Bowers drove a spear through him or anything. “He caught me in my hotel room and he stabbed me. Completely different thing.” He gestures at his own cheek, where he knows the red line is clear, the immediate vicinity of the beard seeming to shy away from it. “In the cheek. Not a big deal.”

“Not a big deal,” Wentworth repeats. “An escaped mental patient stabbed you in the face and it’s not a big deal.”

Maggie says, “Richard, if you’re making this up—”

“Look it up, Ma, you know I don’t write my own shit, I promise you I could not make this up,” Richie says. He holds up one pinkie finger as though offering to make a solemn vow. That wasn’t how he promised things to Eddie when they were kids, Eddie made him spit-swear, clasping hands and hocking loogies simultaneously, explaining that spit was blood but clear. It was the most serious promise that either of them ever made until Stan cut their palms with the broken bottle.

“Did he get your gum?” Went asks, looking at Eddie with a look of almost disgusted concern. It’s extremely similar to Richie’s; Eddie tries to answer while dealing with the déjà vu of having Richie copy-pasted slightly to the right in this room.

“Yeah,” he admits.

“Tooth?” Went asks.

Eddie nods.

“Let me see,” Went says, getting up, and Eddie, not knowing what else to do, gets up as well. Went shuffles him over toward the lamp on the end table and physically turns his head toward better light; he tells Eddie to bite down so he can see the lineup of his teeth. “Oh, yeah,” he agrees, looking in Eddie’s mouth. “Hang on.” He opens the drawer in the end table and pulls out something small; he presses a button and reveals it to be a penlight.

“Oh my god,” Richie says, sounding every inch the embarrassed teenager—and there are a lot of inches.

Not like that.

Absolutely not like that while Richie’s dad is literally holding Eddie’s chin.

Went whistles and asks in a whispery airless voice—because one hand’s operating the penlight and the other is holding Eddie’s face in position—“Did you get that looked at yet?”

Eddie shakes his head. “No, sir.”

Went’s nose wrinkles as he inspects it. “Not if you were in the hospital, I guess.” He rolls his eyes. “You shoulda had that pulled already. Is it hurting you?”

“I am on a lot of painkillers,” Eddie admits.

Went starts chuckling—it’s soundless, like Richie in his hysterics, and Eddie is thrown for a moment before he clicks off the penlight and covers his stoma again to speak. “Yeah, I guess after a crossbeam going through you, your threshold for pain might be a little different. You were always tough, though. That one—” He points at Richie. “—cried the second you threatened to put him in the chair. You were good, though; you behaved.”

“I did not,” Richie says. “What are you talking about? I did not.”

“My little bleeder,” Went says fondly. To Eddie he says, “Sorry about sticking my hands in your mouth. If you want I can call Molere down the road, see if you can get that taken care of. It shouldn’t be bad, should just be the laughing gas.”

Eddie, alarmed at the prospect of sudden dental procedures, says, “Uh, I think I’d have to call my doctor to see how what she gave me would interact with nitrous oxide?” And he doesn’t currently have access to his insurance card, because that, along with everything he needs to identify himself, was lost somewhere in his wallet under Derry.

“MAOIs?” Wentworth asks. “Methotrexate? Eldepryl? Don’t answer that. Can you brush that?”

“That, uh, hurts a little.”

“A little, he says.” Went grimaces. “You ought to be rinsing with salt water. Call your doctor. Trust me, you want that taken care of. If you want to stick around a little longer, I’ll see if I can talk Molere into it. If not.” He gives the same one-shouldered shrug that Richie gave and then sits back down in his armchair. “So what the fuck happened to Bowers?”

Richie, whose _watching my father perform an unlicensed medical examination_ face is bland and somehow sad, shrugs one shoulder. “Dunno. Police came to talk to us at the hospital. Didn’t have any news for us.”

And Eddie almost _believes him_. Eddie knows for a fact that Henry Bowers is currently buried in the floor of a subterranean clubhouse in Derry, and _saw_ the body on the floor of the public library, saw Mike on the floor bleeding and Richie reeling. And if Eddie didn’t know these things, he would _believe_ Richie when he lies.

“Where did it happen?” Maggie asks. “In the house? Was he in the house with you?”

_The call is coming from inside the house!_ Eddie thinks gravely, not remembering any movies but instead remembering the spooky urban legends Richie terrified them with in middle school. He and Bill would go back and forth—Bill _loved_ them, but Richie loved _performing them_ , doing the singsong voice of animated dolls or growling _Psychoes can lick hands too, Eddie,_ and then lunging for Eddie to hold him down and lick his hands. Eddie slapped Richie across the face when Richie sucked on his fingers, not sure why it tickled, and slept with a light on in his room for over a week.

“At the hotel,” Eddie replies softly, trying to be serious. He knows that when he said _Bowers is in my room_ his voice was twisted with incredulity that this was really happening, that everything was happening to him all over again, that he couldn’t get away. Bev was horrified, trying to squeeze the hole in his face shut with her fingers. _Is it bad?_ Blood running down his neck like Bowers had made good and slashed it after all.

“Jesus,” Maggie says, looking at Eddie in something like horror. Maybe just horror. Maybe horror through the lens of a spectator, of someone wandering after the fact— _Are you okay? No, I’m not okay, I just killed a guy!_ Horror by proxy. “Eddie, are you okay?”

Eddie’s a little startled by that and glances at Richie. Richie’s still wearing his liar’s face, quietly observant. He looks back at Maggie, at what looks like her sincere concern. If Eddie tells her _yes_ , will she believe him?

“Oh, I’m fine,” he says. “I mean—” He smiles automatically, trying to placate, trying to de-escalate, it was a big problem for him when he was early in business meetings and being put on the spot, he went to a performance coach who told him not to do that but he finds in this moment he doesn’t care so much about that. “I’m fine,” he says.

“Jesus,” Maggie says again, as Wentworth looks on, eyes very solemn and blue, wearing almost the same watchful face as Richie.

* * *

Discussion of injury flows into discussing their medical problems; it’s already been established that Wentworth had laryngeal cancer that resulted in a full laryngectomy. Richie seems to enjoy doing his father’s voice very much, and Wentworth seems more patiently amused by this than Eddie would expect a parent to be.

“So we decided we were going to get tattoos in celebration of his remission,” Maggie says to Eddie.

Richie groans and averts his gaze, looking down at the green seat cushion.

Eddie sits up a little straighter. “Who’s _we_?”

“It was Richie’s idea,” Maggie says.

Something shorts out in Eddie’s brain and he tries to keep it off his face. He’s never thought of himself as particularly interested in tattoos—Myra is certainly disdainful of them, talking in a self-satisfied way about how now being a person _without_ tattoos is the rarity, though Eddie has no idea what the statistics on that are; as if the rarity of tattoos is what makes them popular. All Eddie knows is that he’s far too afraid of needles and bloodborne illness to ever want one himself, but.

He doesn’t think so much about the actual tattoo—he’s seen a lot of Richie in the last couple days, and by process of elimination is working out where a tattoo might actually be, and if he really sits down and asks himself if Richie has a tattoo on his ass _in front of Richie’s mother_ he’s just going to go insane. But. The idea fits, somehow. Eddie can’t really imagine _Richie peeling out of his clothes and showing Eddie his ink and_ —ahem. Richie actually having a tattoo on his person, but he can imagine Richie in a tattoo parlor. Admittedly, Eddie has very little concept of what a tattoo parlor might look like on the inside, aside from the big glass-front ones in the city, but he can imagine Richie shouldering his way out after a session, leather jacket once more in place, smelling of smoke and—

Eddie turns his head to look at the actual Richie to remind himself they’re in Richie’s parents’ living room, not in a fantasy world where Richie’s the bad boy from an after school special. “You have a tattoo?”

Both of Richie’s parents are grinning. Richie tilts his head all the way back on the armchair and covers his eyes with one hand and pretends to be dead.

“No,” Went says. “He set up the appointments and helped us pick out the design—”

“It’s just the ribbon,” Maggie says. “Head and neck cancers are burgundy and white, there’s a big umbrella.” She folds one arm across her body and pats her own left shoulder. “I won’t show you, I don’t want to scandalize you.”

“I won’t show you, I don’t want to traumatize you,” Wentworth says. He looks at his son again and says, “He chickened out in the parlor.”

Eddie is _delighted_. “Did you really?”

“ _After_ his mother went first,” Went adds.

“Dad, I’m very happy that you lived, do I have to inscribe it on my skin to prove it?” Richie asks from under his hand. “Is it not enough to share your DNA?”

“You suggested it,” Went says.

“I don’t like needles!” Richie says. “How do you think I avoided the slippery slope to heroin? It was fear!”

“Went was talking about the anesthetic he uses in his practice,” Maggie says, apparently unfazed by Richie’s oblique reference to cocaine usage. “And about giving the shot in the roof of the mouth—” Eddie winces a little but Richie gives a full-body shudder that the armchair doesn’t seem big enough to accommodate. “—just winding him up a little, and Richie threw up.”

Very, very different from Eddie’s fantasy of cool Richie. Eddie looks at Richie and waits for him to emerge from where he’s trying to pull the _I can’t see you, you can’t see me_ trick. Slowly Richie lifts his hand and raises his head just enough to make eye contact with Eddie.

“You know I’m telling everyone about this, right?” Eddie asks.

Richie drops his head back again. “Oh, yeah.”

Once Eddie’s and Went’s medical issues are gone over, Maggie reveals that she’s had bilateral knee replacement surgery. Richie seems heartened by this shift in topic and begins chanting, “Show us your scars! Show us your scars!” while drumming his fists on the arms of his chair.

Maggie looks up at Eddie. “Do you want to see my scars?” she asks.

Eddie feels a little hysterical. “Sure,” he says.

She rolls up the legs of her capri pants to her knees and shows the room the thick, short, straight white lines cutting down across her patellas. “And they feel much better,” she says, rolling her cuffs back down again.

“My mother’s the bionic woman,” Richie says.

The pizza from the local place is thin-crusted and speckled with herbs on top. Richie insists on them getting two pizzas—“Ma, look at me. Look at Dad. You could have married a shrimp. But you didn’t, and now you have to put up with ordering two whole large pizzas when I come visit you once a decade. Ma, look at Eddie—you’re not gonna tell Eddie he can only have three pieces of pizza, are you? Ma, _I will pay for the additional pizza_ , please, I’m starving.”

“We were so happy when you moved out,” Went says gravely. “We both got two extra slices.”

Eddie didn’t think he was very hungry, probably because of the Dramamine still in his system, but as soon as he smells the food—Went has to go pick it up, since apparently this little place doesn’t do delivery—his mouth floods so hard he’s in danger of actually drooling. His stomach gurgles threateningly, so loud that Richie starts laughing.

He only eats three slices of pizza anyway. Any more seems like tempting fate. While Went was out picking up the pizza Richie went back out to the car and brought in the luggage, dragging Eddie’s suitcases without complaining across the house and into the blue room, while Maggie asked Eddie once again if he’d like anything else to drink—tea?

“Eddie doesn’t like tea, Ma,” Richie says, as though he knows that Eddie would feel too awkward to refuse.

Apparently tea after dinner is part of the Toziers’ ritual; once the remaining slices of pizza have been crammed into the refrigerator, Went sits up and looks at his wife. “Tea?”

“Please,” she says.

Went looks at Eddie. “Tea?”

Maggie interrupts. “Eddie doesn’t like tea, Went.”

“Are you heat sensitive?” Went asks, which devolves into a discussion of the pros and cons of various toothpastes. Went looks pleasantly surprised that Eddie uses Sensodyne, which satisfies a part of Eddie that still craves medical approval.

“Sure likes hot chocolate, though,” Richie says.

Maggie sits up. “Oh! We have some hot chocolate mix, that—” She snaps her fingers several times, like catching an errant thought is akin to striking a lighter. “—the gift thing in the cupboard, from the white elephant.”

“The white elephant?” Richie repeats, voice thick with skepticism. “At Christmas? Ten months ago?”

His mother ignores him. “It’s fancy, it’s like, Ghirardelli or something. Went, do you remember?”

“I do not,” Wentworth says cheerfully. “I hate those parties; you always let those women hug me.”

Maggie scoffs. “I don’t _let_ them hug you, they don’t ask me.”

“She said, ‘But Maggie says it’s okay to give him hugs.’”

“Why would I say that’s okay? Those are my hugs, I’m not about to invite the old biddies of card club to steal them.”

“They are your hugs,” Went says. “You should be charging them every time they steal them; either money or with legal consequences.”

Richie sits there listening and then tilts his head to the side. “Did you just suggest that Mom pimp you out?”

“Yes, I did, son,” Went says serenely.

Maggie looks at Eddie and says, “So, would you like some hot chocolate?”

“Yeah, Eddie, would you like some ten-month old hot chocolate mix that my mother prostituted my father to acquire?” Richie asks.

“She hasn’t prostituted me _yet_ ,” Went says. “Otherwise we would be able to offer much better hot chocolate.”

Eddie realizes that Maggie is still waiting for a response, apparently unbothered by the double act going on in the room with them. “Um, I’m okay,” he hedges, shrinking a little into the loveseat.

“It’s no trouble, we’re going to make Richie fix it anyway,” Went says. This seems to be news to Richie, who looks around as though surprised. “That’s the point of having adult children.”

“Oh—” Maggie stands. “Richie, did you say you had laundry?”

Richie stares at her. “Why are you getting up? I’m forty. I can do my own laundry. Sit down, that’s the point of having adult children.” He hasn’t taken his duffel bag down to the basement yet, just left it in front of a door that Eddie guesses must lead downstairs; and he gets up and swings it over his shoulder. Maggie sits back down, apparently satisfied. “What kind of tea do you want?”

“French vanilla decaf,” she says promptly. “It’s in the cabinet to the right of the microwave.”

“Decaf Irish breakfast,” Went adds.

Richie leans in the entryway to the kitchen. “Eds?”

Eddie glances around to find that Maggie and Wentworth are both watching him. “I really am okay,” he says.

“Okay, but you better not be being polite with me,” Richie says, walking into the kitchen and disappearing from sight. “God knows these two aren’t.”

Maggie begins humming and then jumps up, saying, “Ooh, I know what I want to listen to,” and goes to switch the disc in the CD player. Soft guitar strumming begins. A strange, flat, childlike woman’s voice sings.

“Truly an anthem for the ages,” Went says, his voice so serious that Eddie understands he’s being deeply sarcastic. Maggie ignores him, humming along and obscuring the words. Wentworth sits up a little straighter and speaks louder, finger pressed over his stoma. “Mags?”

There’s a clatter from the kitchen. Everyone stills, waiting to hear what, if anything, Richie broke. There’s a backtrack of someone whistling in this song.

“It comes in a _sock monkey mug_?” Richie says. “Fuck that, I’m drinking the hot chocolate.”

Went seems to relax, looking from Richie’s general direction back to Maggie. “As I was saying before my son interrupted me,” he says. “Would you like some ice cream?”

Maggie’s mouth puckers into a pleased little O.

Apparently taking that as acceptance, Went looks at Eddie. “Would you like some ice cream? We have cherry vanilla.”

Eddie is… strongly tempted. “Is Richie getting that too?”

“Yes, Richie’s getting that, too,” Richie almost shouts from the kitchen. “Richie’s getting the tea, Richie’s getting the ice cream, Richie’s changing the light bulbs, Richie’s laying the tile.”

“If I trusted in your home repair skills I’d make you fix the leaky pipe under the sink,” Went says.

Maggie looks at Eddie. “I remember his college apartment,” she says seriously. “Instead of fixing the showerhead he duct-taped half a Solo cup to the wall to catch the leak.”

“Oh my god,” Eddie says.

“That was a group decision and I can’t be held personally responsible for it,” Richie says.

“In this court you can,” Went says.

There’s a clatter of more dishes from the kitchen. “Eddie: ice cream?” Richie prompts him.

He feels weird about coming into the Toziers’ home and eating their ice cream. Ordering pizza is one thing, but in his head ice cream is like a resource that they’ve stocked up on, and one that Maggie clearly enjoys.

“It has whole Maraschino cherries in it,” Maggie says, smiling like she’s trying to tempt him.

Eddie likes Maraschino cherries. “Yes, please,” he calls to Richie.

Richie comes back out some minutes later with two bowls of pink ice cream studded with Maraschino cherries, spoons standing straight up in the middle. He hands one to his mother and one to Eddie, then points at Went.

“I couldn’t,” Went says seriously. “I’m a dentist.”

“Retired,” Richie says. “Now if you yank someone’s teeth out, you just go to jail.”

“Oh,” Went says, as though this is news to him. “Well, in that case, since I can’t have the joy of yanking out teeth—yes, I will have some ice cream.”

It’s very good. Eddie eats his ice cream while the Toziers let their tea steep on their leaf coasters and Richie waves a sock monkey mug at him from across the room. It’s… comfortable. Eddie feels like he’s slotting into place in some kind of established ritual, like it’s so powerful it goes on with or without him, and he’s just surprised there’s room for him in it.

Richie says no more about Derry that night, and neither of his parents ask why they went to a condemned house instead of to the police to report a stabbing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Links:  
> [Songs that Never Fail to Make White People Beyond Turnt](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/15HiKjAnUuAymWdqejOTcP?si=XlqIAK7hQiaPZiDZl3HTgg)  
> Richie rocks out to ["I Like It" by TEAM](https://open.spotify.com/track/039Y8HjZokzt6pBQs6iPde?si=1E6yXeYUTRu5pzE_ncxqGg), which is the song he mentions in his monologue in Chapter 1 with voice drop he thinks is hot; and in 1988 ["Suffer Little Children" by The Smiths](https://open.spotify.com/track/1vkLg8wZ9tuetPZ1FhIS0Q?si=53Z9sFXBSFaNYkGvekAu3g%22).  
> Maggie rocks out to ["Maggie May" by Rod Stewart](https://open.spotify.com/track/6rovOdp3HgK1DeAMYDzoA7?si=TshqgYaKQPC1zROHubDhfw) and ["Tire Swing" by Kimya Dawson](https://open.spotify.com/track/4tUOIdAbmMCYnrxSVbyc9V?si=FvjHkahqRU-hUfwYFll_Rg). You may choose a Celine Dion song of your choice.
> 
>   
> All of Richie's playlist titles are taken from my own, so if you're interested in a link let me know. I plan to release an Indelicate playlist once I finally finish this behemoth.


	11. Kinda Gotta Look

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Eddie has a dream. Richie has a question.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi! I hope the issue where the email notifications for Chapter 10 didn't go out has been fixed now!
> 
> Content warnings for this chapter: EMETOPHOBIA, both mentioned and on-screen. Skip from "'Fuck off,' Eddie whispers" to "hang out here for a little bit." Details of what you missed in the endnotes. The persistent sexual threat of Its appearance to Eddie. Mention of mouth surgery (specifically gum grafts). Eddie contemplates his injuries in more graphic detail than he has in previous chapters, including the specific process of breaking ribs during CPR. Eddie remembers homophobic bullying and slurs. Canonical child death (Georgie, others). Sexually suggestive content in a horror setting. Abandonment issues. I am not sponsored by Nimbus. _Risky Business_ (1983).

Eddie tires quickly, but apparently so does Wentworth Tozier. At a certain point in the evening’s conversation he yawns—the deep groaning yawn of dads everywhere, Eddie remembers it not just from Bill’s and Stan’s dads but also from Wentworth himself some thirty years ago, now performed from the trachea instead of the mouth. Richie begins giggling immediately and, mouth still open, Went flips him off with his free hand. He seems to gulp for a moment and Eddie has a wobbling anxiety about whether he’s about to watch Richie’s dad vomit casually in this living room, and then Went says in guttural tones that seem to come from somewhere else, “This disrespect. In my own home.”

Richie leans all the way back in his armchair and tilts his head back a little bit. Eddie’s gaze falls automatically to his Adam’s apple and realizes that Richie is mimicking his dad, swallowing air. Then Richie sits up straight and puts on a bright face. His mouth doesn’t open, but he definitely emits the sound, _“Twinkle, twinkle, little star!”_

Eddie is so alarmed his feet come up off the floor like he’s seen a mouse. Richie clocks him immediately, grinning with more teeth than most humans consider polite for mixed company. Went seems to share Eddie’s confusion, having jerked his head back as though to increase the distance between himself and his son without actually getting up.

Maggie claps her hands together. “Can you do it again?” she asks.

Richie, happy to show off, appears to swallow more air before singing, _“How I wonder what you are!”_ with his mouth shut.

Maggie applauds again. “Did you learn that from a book?”

“A friend,” Richie says.

Eddie and Wentworth both stare at him. Slowly Eddie lowers his feet back to the floor and says, somewhat quietly in the room, “I either need to go to bed or to start drinking.”

“Seconded,” Went says. He points at Eddie with his free hand and Eddie freezes in place on the loveseat. “Don’t go anywhere,” he says, and gets up.

Eddie looks around at Richie for some clue as to what’s about to happen, but Richie looks unconcerned, still preening. Well, he’s not actually moving, but from the self-satisfied tilt of his head Eddie knows that’s what he’s doing. Went walks around the couch, behind it, and up the stairs. He hears a door open. Eddie has time to wonder whether he’s just entered into some kind of bizarre hospitality pact where he has to remain on the loveseat until Went comes down again in the morning, when Went tromps back down the stairs, his steps heavy.

Richie turns his head to look at his dad as Went steps clear of the railing. “Oh god,” Richie says, looking away, his head thumping back on the cushion of the chair. Eddie has seen that face countless times on teenage Richie, and its recurrence just makes Eddie feel like he’s digging up Richie out of a time capsule.

Went comes back around the couch, walks across the living room, and then presents Eddie with an array of plastic-wrapped toothbrushes.

“Dad,” Richie complains.

Eddie does not move, wondering whether his toothbrushing skills are so egregiously subpar that Wentworth, a professional, was offended and is trying to convey this by giving him a toothbrush, as a sort of _do better_ gesture.

“I think you’re an aggressive brusher,” Wentworth says, covering his stoma again so his voice comes out hoarse but kind, the way that sometimes Eddie’s anonymous peer reviews say that _Eddie is bright and competent but he can’t take criticism_ , as if Eddie cares what his peers have to say. “You’re wearing down your gums. If you were my patient, I’d refer you to a periodontist for a gum graft.”

Eddie has no idea what that is and he is _horrified_ at the prospect. Like a skin graft? For the _gums_? _Someone else’s gums in his mouth?_ Eddie will do whatever he has to to prevent that from happening.

“So this is a Nimbus,” Went says. “They’re very soft toothbrushes. The bristles are very fine, so it’ll hurt your gums less. And it’ll make brushing _that_ —well, not painless, but less excruciating.”

Eddie blinks once before he admits, “Less excruciating would be an improvement.”

“There you go.”

Went holds his hand out a little further, prompting Eddie to take one. Eddie is forty years old and he’s too old to choose a toothbrush based on color instead of bristle softness or effectiveness at removing plaque, but Wentworth is a retired dentist, and Eddie’s going to have to believe that Wentworth has done the research for him, meaning he’s free to be frivolous. He takes the red one.

“Thank you,” he says.

Instead of replying Wentworth smiles a Richie grin, one whole half of his face scrunching up, and then he walks back around the couch toward the stairs. He leans over the back of the couch to kiss Maggie on the top of the head. “Good night,” he says. He walks a few steps further and then reaches out and presses his knuckles into the top of Richie’s head. Richie winces. “Good night.”

“Bastard,” Richie says.

Went snorts and goes upstairs, waving as he does. “Good night, Eddie.”

Eddie waves back at him. “Good night,” he says dumbly, and then looks down at the toothbrush in his hand. His throat hurts, all of a sudden, as though he might cry, and he doesn’t quite understand why. He looks over at Richie.

Richie is slumped in the chair in a way that’s going to hurt his back in the morning, his head at an unlikely angle with his jaw propped on his hand. He looks at Eddie for a long moment, eyes narrowed in something like contemplation, and then looks at Maggie.

“When do you turn into a pumpkin, Ma?” he asks.

Maggie smiles and shrugs. She looks very young in that moment, like a girl from an old-timey TV show kicking her feet on a porch swing. “Whenever,” she says, looking from Richie to Eddie. Her pleased face has the same narrowed eyes as Richie’s thoughtful face. “What time do you want to get on the road tomorrow?”

Richie reverses his slouch to lean the other way, still contemplative, glancing at Eddie. “It’s like, what, five hours?”

“On I-90 West,” Eddie confirms. Ben, being a responsible person when not attacking underage werewolves with lawn garbage, provided them with ample instructions, a street address, and what Eddie strongly suspects are global positioning coordinates. Eddie very much appreciates Ben. He glances down and checks his phone, oddly satisfied to see a number of notifications in the group chat, at least some of which definitely have to be about Richie’s baby pictures.

Richie looks back at Maggie. “Yeah. So not too early. We don’t have a set time to arrive or anything, so whenever we’re both up and ready to go.” He shrugs, not quite the same gesture as his mother. Maggie shrugs narrowly, shoulders hunching in on each other; Richie shrugs in a way that takes up space.

Eddie sits there awkwardly, knowing that what Richie is saying loosely translates to _I’m waiting on Eddie._ Which is fine, Eddie tells himself. Sleep is very important for healing, and he’s still waking up at appropriate morning hours, which is impressive considering how long he spent in the hospital with no daily commitments other than the staff carrying him around every two hours to prevent blood clots. And now that he’s here, he doesn’t need to set an alarm to be sure he gets to say goodbye to Stan and Patty or Mike or Ben and Bev. He just needs to sleep and heal, because he’s injured, and his body needs the rest.

It’s fine, he tries to tell himself. He has a funny idea—mostly learned from his hospital stay, from hobbling back and forth to bathrooms and poor Nathan standing at the sink giving him as much dignity as the situation will allow—that there are things his body needs, and Eddie may not be happy about giving them to it, but if he doesn’t, his body will take it. Something about a deep animal impulse for survival, responses that his body knows how to trigger that Eddie doesn’t. _If we run out of blood, we will crash. If we crash on the table, but they apply more blood and electricity, we can make a life out of that. If Stan breathes in our mouth and Richie beats our heart for us—well, that’s not quite as good as doing it ourselves, but those two are almost us anyway._

“I think I’m going to go to bed, too,” Eddie offers. He has the feeling that Richie and Maggie both saw this coming. He looks at Richie and says, “I’m not going to set an alarm, so whenever…?”

Richie nods, the rapid bob of the head that felt so familiar in the restaurant and helped superimpose the familiar frog-faced kid on the unknown square-jawed man. “Yeah, go for it. It’s _Chez Marguerite_. We’re on island time, buddy.”

 _Buddy._ Eddie almost grins at that. He thinks he remembers that in the hospital he was angry at Richie for calling him that, but here at Richie’s parents’ house it feels almost like a stamp of approval, like a title. _Under these terms does Edward Kaspbrak take shelter in our dwelling, and let all who see him know he is: buddy._

“The bathroom’s down that hall on the left,” Maggie says. “Towels are in the closet directly across from it, and there are bottles of water in the fridge. Also if you need to get up in the middle of the night and eat something, there are Ritz crackers, peanut butter, and jelly.”

Richie whistles. “Really pulling out all the stops, Maggie.”

“Someday, Richard, when you have a grown-up house, you too can eat Ritz crackers in bed.”

“The height of luxury.”

On that note, Eddie retreats to the blue room and the implied safety of his array of suitcases, his new red toothbrush in hand. He notices with faint surprise that Richie also brought in his electric blanket and left it folded on the foot of the bed. Eddie sets his plastic-wrapped toothbrush down on it and opens up his toiletry case, retrieving his toothpaste, his face wash, his night medicine.

Richie and his mother are still talking when he creeps back out to get ready for bed, but they’ve lowered their voices now—not in a way that suggests they’re discussing something secret, but in a way that suggests they’re trying to be considerate. If Eddie listens hard—as he picks his way to the bathroom—he can hear mechanical wheezing from upstairs. Wentworth uses some kind of breathing machine.

“—heard you were going to be in New York, so of course that was my first assumption.”

Richie says, his tone curiously flat, “Why would that be your first assumption? She’s married with a kid.”

“I know she’s married with a kid, we’re friends on Facebook.”

“You’re—” Eddie has the unique experience of hearing Richie’s voice break, not tearful, but as though he’s too appalled to speak. Eddie glances over his shoulder as he enters the bathroom, but Richie’s not paying attention to him. Eddie doesn’t know who they’re talking about, so he brushes his teeth and tends to his other ablutions. The new toothbrush is excellent. It is as soft as promised.

There’s a little bit of fluid leaking out of his incision site. There’s no visible stain on the skull shirt (Eddie forgot he was wearing the goddamn skull shirt), but there’s definitely a damp patch. He grimaces as he sniffs at it. It doesn’t smell _good_ , but it doesn’t smell rancid or like rot or anything. He turns to look at it in the mirror, and the bruising is _spectacular_ but he can’t see any swelling or redness around it either. Probably because his whole torso is still black and eggplant purple.

He curses himself in the mirror a little bit and then leans out of the bathroom. “Hey, Rich?”

Richie is leaning forward in his armchair, his expression extremely serious as he talks to his mother. They both look around at Eddie, who holds the skull shirt up in front of his chest as if that’ll help with anything. Richie’s face immediately smooths out. “Need a hand?”

Maggie Tozier’s expression is politely inquiring.

“Uh, yeah,” Eddie admits. He swallows. “Don’t look at the wound, I don’t want you to puke.”

Richie gets up and Eddie hears his knee pop from all the way over here. Richie grimaces and stretches, arms up over his head, his hands laced together and pushing toward the ceiling.

Maggie Tozier looks a little alarmed. “Did that hurt?”

“Yep,” Richie says. He lets his arms fall. “I’m getting old, Maggie.”

“You inherited my knees,” Maggie says gravely.

Richie chuckles and walks over to the bathroom. Eddie resists the urge to shut the door a little further as he waits, self-conscious not just about what he’s asking Richie to do for him, but also about Maggie Tozier patiently waiting in her living room for her son to come back.

“I have emotional responses other than vomiting,” Richie murmurs. He nudges Eddie off to the side and rolls up his sleeves to wash his hands without being asked. Eddie watches him wait with his fingers under the water for a few seconds, waiting for it to properly heat, before he soaps up.

“Like what?” Eddie asks Richie’s forearms. 

It’s hard not to. Richie scrubs up to his elbows, streaks of white suds against black hair. Eddie jerks his eyes back up before Richie can notice him staring, but Richie’s brow is furrowed in concentration as he leans down and tries to fit his whole elbow in the tiny round sink so he can rinse. Eddie can see the reflection in the tripartite mirror over the medicine cabinet—very high placed. The Toziers are all tall.

Richie chuckles again, his voice low. “Wouldn’t you like to know?” he intones. He turns back and holds out one hand in Eddie’s general direction. 

Eddie stares at him, nonplussed, for several moments before he realizes that Richie’s reaching for the towel on the rack behind him.

Eddie takes one step backward and out of the way. “Crying?” he asks, thinking of nothing so much as Richie’s “Phlebotomy” playlist.

Richie laughs. “Yeah.” He reaches out for the box of bandages and pulls one out in its white wrapper. “All right, turn around, show me the target.”

“Don’t say it like that,” Eddie says, turning anyway.

“How am I supposed to say it?”

“I don’t care how you say it, don’t look at it.”

“You just told me not to say it like that! We both know that’s physically impossible, I kinda gotta look unless you want this sucker _covering your mouth_.” Richie has a point under all the sass: the injury has a kind of gravitational pull for the eye, like a black hold in Eddie’s torso. There’s a plasticky stretching sound as Richie peels the backing off the bandage. “Is this gonna hurt you?”

Eddie swallows. “I mean, it needs to be secure. You can’t just, uh. You gotta put it on so it stays on.”

“And the overlap on the stitches is fine?” Richie’s voice is casual, almost clinical about it.

Eddie cringes. “Yeah.”

“Okay. Incoming.” Richie presses the bandage onto his back. Eddie feels him run a fingertip across the top edge of the bandage, and then down along the left side. It doesn’t _hurt_ exactly, but Richie is by definition pushing a bruise. Eddie makes a face as Richie repeats the move across the right edge, then along the bottom. “All right, will that work for you?”

“Should,” Eddie says, revolted at the very idea of Richie seeing his wounds. For a moment he considers asking Richie if he’s doing laundry and if he could throw the skull shirt in with it, but Eddie’s probably going to have to go at it with stain remover just because he knows what’s on it. “Thanks.” He starts to pull his hoodie on over his bare chest. The hoodie seems to have missed most of the drainage, and for that Eddie is grateful.

“No problem,” Richie says. Eddie’s grimacing as he tries to pull the sleeves up onto his shoulders. “Are you sleeping in that?” he asks, incredulous.

“No,” Eddie says. He glances at the door and then at Richie—who is not making eye contact, but staring in the vicinity of Eddie’s belly button. Sheer anxiety propels Eddie into getting the hoodie up into place and he hisses in pain.

Richie’s head snaps up and he makes eye contact with him, one brow raised. “Did that hurt? Why are you doing that if it hurts?”

“Your—” Eddie glares at him and then looks at the door again. “Your mother’s out there.” He’s not even happy with _Richie_ seeing him like this, he’s not going to subject Maggie to it.

“Ah, yes, and if there’s one thing we know about my mother, it’s that she’s never seen a shirtless man before,” Richie says, before raising his voice slightly. “Hey, Ma?”

“Fuck,” Eddie mumbles, grimacing hard enough to close his eyes.

“Yes?” Maggie calls back, perfectly pleasant.

“Eddie’s half-naked, avert your eyes.”

“Okay,” she says just as brightly.

Eddie hisses at Richie, “Fuck off.”

Richie holds up both his hands. “Fucking off,” he says. He steps backward out of the open bathroom door and goes. Eddie finds himself staring into the dark hallway, at the closed door behind which lurks the basement, where Richie will be sleeping.

* * *

He dreams about it. Not It for once, not really. Instead he’s outside his body, watching himself sleep, shirtless on the electric blanket like a lizard warming itself on a hot rock. He can dimly feel that the arm pinned under him is going numb, but rolling onto his front or back is still too painful for him to sleep through.

Instead he turns—not in bed, but standing beside it in the navy dark of the blue room—and crosses the room. There’s no reflection in the glass doors of the Ikea bookcases; he feels carpet soft under his feet as he walks to the door. There’s a slight step up out of the room. He opens the door very slowly, backing up and making room for it, and then carefully steps up.

There’s no answering jolt in his chest as he shifts his weight. He has sensation, almost—the texture of the carpet, the cool of the doorknob under his fingertips—but no feedback from his body. He closes the door gingerly behind himself. This bottom stair creaks under his weight. Without a conscious decision to do so or real understanding of why, he steps closer to the wall. He knows it will make his steps quieter, that floorboards don’t creak there, but he doesn’t know why it’s important. There’s a tiled patch between the stairs and the swollen-shut front door. If he were awake his toes would curl away from it, it’s so cold.

Is he going outside? Is he sleepwalking? Is he having an out of body experience, astral projecting? Why not, at this point? After everything, why not.

But he turns right down the hallway and moves slowly, slowly, back onto the carpet. In the space between couch and stairs; past the narrow table with its identical lamps with their silk shades and the photo of Richie, the frame adorned with candy canes. A bowl with round ceramic orbs in it, decorative, like baubles for a Christmas tree but heavy-looking. A basket with knitting. He has a lot of time to consider them, he moves so slowly. So, so slowly. Trying not to be heard.

There’s a photo of Richie on the wall. High school graduation. Richie by himself in the driveway of the Tozier house, grimacing at the camera. Taken after he got tall, but before he got broad, so he’s still gangly and curly-haired, but his jaw’s gone square and sharp, his face gone heavy rather than narrow and pointy. An in-between Richie, wearing his ugly yellow cap and gown.

Eddie doesn’t remember him. He remembers the ordeal that was acquiring the cap and gown, the practice graduation all the seniors had to sit through when they were bussed to Bassey Park, the ordeal of trying to alphabetize themselves after twelve years going to school together—thirteen for the morning kindergarten class. Eddie remembers walking to his place in the line and thinking _Bill would go there… Ben would go there… Mike would go between them, if he ever went to our school._ In fact there were a lot of those moments, mournful moments thinking of where people long gone belonged, because Derry ate its children. Not all of them ran away. Not all of them got to run away, they were devoured entirely, blood sacrifice, open season. Eddie Corcoran, Betty Ripsom. Hell, even Patrick Hockstetter, dangerous animal though he was. Georgie Denbrough, who never made it to the fourth grade. Consumed whole.

He turns right into the hallway. The doorway to Maggie’s room—the Toziers don’t share a bed anymore, and part of Eddieis surprised by that, since he’s had no cause to doubt their devotion since his arrival at their house—is closed. The doorway to the bathroom is open, another dark shadow in this dark hallway. The door to the basement is closed. He knows it’s the door to the basement; it’s a little too high, the gap between it and the carpet a little too large.

He opens it and…

Stares down into the basement of Keene’s Pharmacy.

He wonders, sometimes, if he ever actually went down there. If Keene—despite being an absolute quack of a pharmacist, filling prescriptions with camphor and water like that wasn’t a total waste of everyone’s time, groping at Eddie’s face and making noises about cancer despite the fact that he’s _a pharmacist and not a dermatologist_ but at least having the decency to break it to Eddie, the decency to tell him that his mother was full of shit and so was the doctor she sent him to—if Keene left the door unlocked for little boys to stumble down into; if Keene actually left the door unlocked for thin delicate men to wander down into and it wasn’t a total hallucination. Walking home covered in vomit indicates yes; but why would there need to be needles in the basement, stored in such a non-sterile environment? Why would there need to be a medical chair or a—a slab, or whatever it was? Why a curtain? What if it was all a farce made up by It? Eddie’s worst fears, now having an open house.

Eddie steps forward and his foot takes a long time to hit the unfinished stair. It’s a steep stairwell, very narrow. And he can’t stop himself from leaving the safety of the carpet in the Tozier’s house and descending into hell once more. His chest doesn’t hurt at all. He wonders if, in his dream, he’ll get winded walking back up the stairs.

Then he realizes he isn’t breathing at all. The way he sometimes dreams of swimming underwater and tries to hold his breath, but discovers that in his dream the air is right there for him when he needs it, whether he knows it or not.

There’s a hard turn in the stairwell that his body follows without his permission or his desire or his prompting, and he sees the filthy unfinished basement, the scattered medical equipment ( _bet they don’t have an intrusive spectrometer, Eds!_ ), the drawn curtain. Eddie’s eyes search, looking for the leper, looking for _It_ , looking for the trick, the trap, and his feet keep moving forward. He can look in whatever direction he pleases, but he can’t stop himself from walking forward, from approaching that raggedy curtain.

He hears breathing.

Not his, he knows he isn’t breathing right now. But he hears it, hears fast, deep breathing. Someone or something panting. The monster of his childhood, lurking under one of the shelves?

 _“Ah,”_ someone moans.

Eddie stills there, bare feet on the dirty dangerous floor. The almost oily texture of it, under the accumulated dried filth. He stares at the pale green curtain, at the metal rings on the railing, at the distance between the setup and the ceiling itself ( _but not loft ceilings. How do you change those lightbulbs?_ ). He knows what the dream wants—wants him to reach out and draw back the curtain and see, wants him to be entranced, wants him to be horrified.

The next sound that comes from behind the curtain is a long scaled-out _“Mmm!”_ The voice is deep. It’s a man’s voice.

Eddie whips his head around, knowing, waiting, and sees—not the leper, but himself, standing there in his red hoodie and his blue polo, his cheek unmarked except by that possibly cancerous mole Keene just manhandled. The other him has his arms crossed over his chest and looks completely unconcerned by what he’s hearing, maybe a little skeptical. He looks like—if he were the kind of man to lean, which he isn’t—he might rest his back against the wooden shelves and listen, waiting for it to be over. That’s what Eddie does during sex. He waits for it to be over.

The man behind the curtain moans again, _“Mm, ah, ah—!”_ before lapsing back into panting.

And Eddie feels furious.

He rounds on himself, crossing the narrow room, about ready to shove him up against the wooden shelving. The other him doesn’t recoil and Eddie slows, wanting to keep some space between them, not ready to reach out and grab him by the throat.

“Fuck you,” Eddie says. “ _Fuck_ you, leave him alone. Get the fuck out of here, what are you doing?”

The other Eddie looks back at him and raises one eyebrow. “What are you doing here?” he asks.

Eddie coughs out a laugh. “You think I want to be here?”

The _“Ahn”_ from behind the curtain nearly splits the room in half. It rings in Eddie’s ears.

“Yes,” the other Eddie replies calmly, as unimpressed as he is with any one-on-one meeting where someone tries to express _quality concerns_ about his work, right before he rips into them and explains to them that just because they _think_ it’s possible doesn’t mean that the software agrees with them.

Eddie shoves him and the other Eddie smacks back into the shelving. A jar of syringes rattles and falls to the ground; neither of them pay it any attention. The props are pointless now.

“It’s none of my _fucking_ business,” Eddie snaps back at him. “I don’t have time for this.”

The other him smiles like he knows a secret Eddie doesn’t. Eddie’s not used to that look on his own face, that enigma of expression. It looks kind of stupid, he thinks. “You’ve got a lot of time. You're on island time!”

“I’m not doing this,” Eddie says, and turns to leave.

The other Eddie grabs him by the wrist. “You want to,” he says, and suddenly his face breaks into a grin. Blood wells from his cheek and mouth and spills down his neck, staining the collar of his polo shirt. “You’ll do it for free,” he says, voice twisting, becoming less than him.

Eddie hits him. Just reaches out and slaps him across the face. Blood spatters; he feels it make its impact—his cheek, his nose, his lips. He balls his hand into a fist and wipes the back of it across his mouth. It leaves a long smear. Eddie thinks of tissues with Myra’s blotted lipstick, left in the bathroom trash can.

The other him smiles and there’s something odd about his face, too. The point of his upper lip has to be more pronounced than Eddie’s. Maybe it’s exaggerated by the blood spilling out of his mouth. It runs down his neck. Eddie feels a phantom itch, rusting over his own throat, his collarbone.

“What do you want, Eds?” the other Eddie asks. “What are you looking for? If you lived here, you’d be—”

Eddie hits him again. Blood sprays again. Eddie doesn’t care—this is him, his blood is clean, it’s always been clean, he knows it, he’s _always known it_. Eddie slaps him once more and then releases him, taking a step back.

The man behind the curtain moans, _“Oh. Oh, Eddie.”_

“Fuck yeah I’ll do it for free,” Eddie snaps back at the other him. “I’ll suck all the dicks I want, I don’t care—but this isn’t that kind of dream, and this isn’t what I want, and when I have it it’ll be _mine_ , you—” He makes a fist of his hand, at last, and swings for the other him.

And the other Eddie swings in kind and punches him in the chest.

He feels the pressure before he feels the pain—his ribcage buckling, the responding pressure on the other side of his chest as the blow goes all the way through him, his lungs popping, his blood spurting. And only then does the pain hit him, and he falls away, onto the needle-flecked ground, and the rings clatter as the curtain slides back, and—

* * *

He wakes up, his chest on fire with how it’s aching, how it’s itching. He’s afraid to move, knowing that if he does he’ll throw up, maybe immediately, but also afraid that if he doesn’t move he’ll fall back to sleep and be right back there, in the pharmacy basement. He’s afraid to breathe too hard for fear of how it’ll agitate his chest.

There’s a small white trash can on the other side of the nightstand, he remembers. He takes as deep a breath as he can manage and then he rolls over quickly, quick as he can with his torso in the state it’s in, and grabs it, flips it upside down to dump out anything in it, and then turns it to hold under his chin.

Nothing happens. Eddie pants, sweating, for several long moments. He hurt something in his side when he reached for the garbage can, he realizes now as his body makes its protests known. He braces the trash can on his knees and inclines his head and leans over it, trembling.

 _You’re sick,_ his body informs him.

“Fuck off,” Eddie whispers.

But he gets up and walks—quietly, but reasonably paced—to the Toziers’ bathroom, mindful of Went snoring upstairs and filling the loft ceiling with the sound of his breathing and his whirring and clicking machine. The door is open; he closes it quietly, turns the light on, and kneels in front of the toilet on a small plush rug placed there.

He tries to be quiet about it, but some things can’t be helped. He can control how loud he is, but everything outside of his body is out of his own control.

He doesn’t know how long it is before he hears a gentle knock at the door. He thinks, _Oh god, Richie_ right before Maggie asks, “Hello?” and then he remembers that her room is right next door.

Eddie swallows, gulps, tries to get his throat under his control. “Sorry, Mrs. Tozier,” he says.

“Are you decent?” she asks.

Eddie should have locked the door. “Yes, ma’am,” he replies. He barely gets the _ma’am_ out.

The door opens. Eddie is conscious of the smell, the volume, the late hour, the fact that he’s still retching, the fact that he’s shirtless and his stitches and bandages are basically on display. He can’t even look up at her, his eyes are streaming too badly.

“Any blood?” Maggie asks him.

Oh god. He checks and then shakes his head.

“Good,” she says. “I’ll bring you some water.”

“You don’t have to,” he chokes out, breathless.

“You need some water,” she replies easily. She brings him back a bottle from the kitchen and stands there as Eddie flushes the toilet, cracks the lid of the bottle, and rests there with his temple pressed up against the bathtub as he takes little sips. He rinses his mouth and spits in the still-refilling bowl.

“I’m so sorry,” he says.

“Don’t be, honey, it’s not like I have work in the morning,” she says.

Eddie takes the trick out of Mike’s book and puts the cap back on the water so he can hold it to the back of his neck. He can’t keep his eyes open and he’s a little relieved by that, in a way, he’s so ashamed. And he can hear heavy footsteps on stairs, someone else he woke up and coming toward him, and he’s in hell.

There’s a creak as a door opens and then Richie asks quietly, “Everything all right?”

“Eddie’s not feeling well,” Maggie replies calmly.

Eddie doesn’t look up.

“I got him,” Richie says. Eddie hears him stepping into the bathroom. He doesn’t look up, doesn’t open his eyes, just tries to pretend this isn’t happening. “You all right, Eds?” Richie asks. His voice is thick with sleep.

“Peachy,” Eddie replies, editing out the profanity only out of courtesy to Maggie Tozier.

Richie gives a faint huff of laughter. “Think you’re gonna go again?”

“I don’t know, maybe,” Eddie says. There’s no nausea that accompanies the thought; he feels shivery and weak, but at least done for now. But he’s absolutely not going to risk vomiting in Maggie Tozier’s blue room, so he’s going to hang out here for a little bit.

“Okay,” Richie says, and then Eddie hears him settling down, back sliding down the wall, joints clicking as he folds his knees. He does open his eyes at this and look at Richie in something like horror. Richie’s wearing pajama pants, red and black plaid. Eddie does not know where those came from, or where they were when Richie was hanging out in his boxers in the hotel room. Richie catches him looking and flexes his toes so that they pop. Eddie winces. Richie smiles, heavy-lidded. He’s not wearing his glasses.

“Can you even see me right now?” Eddie asks, his voice acid-thin.

“Nope,” Richie says, popping the P. “Who are you? What are you doing in my parents’ house? I know krav maga.”

“You do not,” Eddie says, eyes closing again.

“I know of it,” he insists.

Eddie allows himself to laugh a little at that—nothing that reaches his lungs, just a faint jostling of his whole body.

“Tired?” Richie asks.

Eddie nods, not wanting to admit how his sleep was interrupted.

“You want to go back to bed?”

“No,” Eddie mumbles. He’s reaching the point where overexertion means he’s weak and shaky and cold now, and he’s missing his blanket, but he’s afraid to go back to the guest room. At least so far he hasn’t done any damage—everything is contained and neatly cleaned away, barring odors. His throat is raw. He starts to shiver.

“Okay,” Richie says. “Come here, man. Come on.” He puts a hand on Eddie’s shoulder and Eddie opens his eyes a little to realize that Richie’s trying to tug him over toward him, and Eddie is… too tired to fight it. He goes from propped upright against the Tozier’s bathtub to the other way, leaning all the way across the bathroom floor to put his head on Richie’s thigh.

“Is this even good for your knees?” Eddie asks, eyes shut. The pajama pants are flannel and clearly old, studded with little fuzzballs. He can smell laundry detergent. If Richie sneezes he’ll probably accidentally knee Eddie in the face.

“You know, I think I’ll live,” Richie says. His fingers push into Eddie’s hair.

Eddie discovers small parts of him were resistant only when they go totally limp, giving in and putting all his weight on Richie’s leg. When he blinks his eyes open just hazily he stares at the cabinet under the sink and tells himself this is fine, and closes his eyes again.

“I can go get you a pillow if you want,” Richie offers. “Maggie puts seven of them on her beds. She read in HGTV magazine that eight is too many. I asked.”

Eddie tries to raise his head to look around for Maggie. “God, I’m so sorry,” he mumbles.

Richie snorts. “Did you do it on purpose?”

“People still have to apologize for things they do accidentally,” Eddie says.

“I guarantee you that my mother will laugh at you if you try,” Richie says. “I guarantee it.”

“And sorry for waking you up,” Eddie adds. He should get up and brush his teeth.

Richie cards gently through his hair. “And if you apologize to me again,” he says, “you don’t want to know what I’ll do.”

“You’re not scary,” Eddie mutters.

Richie laughs; Eddie can feel the little muscle impulses all the way down his body, though his legs barely move at all. “I’m really not,” he agrees.

* * *

At some point Eddie feels Richie shake him awake, feels him say, “All right, buddy, let’s go,” and hook him under the arms. Eddie gasps when Richie’s hand comes too close to the site of his intercostal drain; Richie’s hand whips away just as quickly. “Sorry, sorry,” he murmurs.

“S’okay,” Eddie mumbles. He knots his hands in Richie’s dumb T-shirt and hangs on. There are surfaces to brace himself on—the bathroom sink, the tub. He holds on to Richie, and Richie groans as he straightens himself up, and Eddie blinks blearily. He’s falling back to sleep standing up, the sleep is so heavy on his eyelids and in the back of his brain. He gets intermittent flashes of their bare feet, turned toward each other’s on the fluffy white rug.

“You good?” Richie asks.

Eddie feels a touch across his forehead and has to pipe up, defend against this image of Sonia Kaspbrak checking him for a fever.

“’M not sick, I’m drugged,” he insists.

“I know. Believe me, I know,” Richie says, and leads him back out of the bathroom, down the hall. “Watch your step here.” He holds Eddie’s elbows and Eddie blindly takes the step up, hears Richie open the door to the blue room, lets Richie guide him back to the step down. “There we go.”

Eddie hangs on until Richie turns in place and then Eddie feels the thump of the bed against the backs of his knees. He sits almost accidentally, releasing Richie’s shirt before the pull on his arms can hurt.

“Is this how you sleep?” Richie asks, finally looking at the still-made bed with the electric blanket stretched across it.

“Not allowed to sweat,” Eddie mumbles. He pitches forward, puts his forehead somewhere in the vicinity of Richie’s solar plexus. “I’m really sorry,” he says.

Richie is soft. There’s a faint give to his stomach that Eddie finds pleasant and comforting—the idea that Richie will give this far and no farther; the idea that Eddie could reach up and grab him and he’d be so solid, so warm. He smells so good.

Richie shushes him. “Go back to sleep, Eds.”

But it’s the sleeping that Eddie’s apologizing for—the sleeping and the dreaming and the brusque fantasy of what Richie might say, how Richie might breathe. Eddie hooks his fingers in the hem of Richie’s T-shirt. “Don’t go,” he says. And in it is tangled up _don’t leave me, I always knew you would leave me_ and _climb in, live in my sheets, be warm, be solid, be real, let me hold you, hold me, I want you_ and _don’t go back down there, you don’t know what’s down there_.

Richie’s hand gently detaches Eddie’s from his shirt, and a faint push on Eddie’s right shoulder propels him down to the pillow again. “I won’t. I’ll be on the couch if you need me, all right?”

Eddie doesn’t need, he just wants; he just wants because deep down maybe he’s always been selfish, maybe he always takes from people but then claims he can’t be blamed for it because it wasn’t something he asked for, like he didn’t seek it out, like—

He lets go, his head full of _I always knew you would leave me, Eddie!_ and he can’t tell if the dream is Sonia or Myra.

* * *

Eddie wakes up in pain. This is not new to him, but this time it’s not his body trying to transmit the information _you’ve been stabbed again_ to him. His entire body throbs. He lies there on the bed, the flatsheet pulled up over his back, having rolled at some point in his sleep to prop his body up on his left shoulder and his right knee. His left hand is tucked under his stomach, helping keep the bulk of his injuries off the actual mattress. Eddie is kind of impressed that his sleeping body did that without his prompting—that it moves to defend itself.

Then he remembers that he definitely didn’t pull the sheet up over himself, so Richie must have, and he remembers how mortifying last night was, and then he does his best to curl up like a pill bug despite his limited mobility.

Oh god. He woke up Richie’s mother, he was half naked, he has a stunning number of bruises and stitches on display, and he threw up in front of her. And she was very nice about it—Eddie doesn’t know if, in her position, he would have the wherewithal to be nice about someone causing that much of a disturbance at that hour—but Eddie doesn’t know that he gave her much of a choice.

And then Richie came in—which meant he was making enough noise to wake Richie downstairs too, which means he probably also woke up Wentworth upstairs, which means he disturbed the entire house—and just… sat up with him. Let him fall asleep on him and waited to see if Eddie would throw up again, and he didn’t, so what if Richie thinks he was taking advantage of the situation and just wanted to curl up on his knee like a kid, after Eddie made such a fuss about Richie treating him like a patient, treating him like a child…

And then Eddie asked him to sleep in the bed with him.

“Fuck,” he mutters into the pillows. There were seven on the bed; Eddie quietly removed the decorative fish pillows and set them on the floor next to the bedside table, and now he only has four to whisper his agonies into. He knots his clumsy right hand into a fist and punches at one, punctuating each blow with _“Fuck, fuck, fuck, shit, fuck, fucking hell, goddamn, fuck.”_

For some reason punching the pillow doesn’t change anything about his immediate situation. His fist chooses to provide him with some bodily feedback for once, informing him that these pillows are pleasantly stuffed. They’re nice guest pillows, not the flat nonsense you put out because you don’t know how to get rid of them. Eddie feels worse and pats the pillow almost apologetically before letting his hand fall to the side.

What time is it, even?

He rolls over to check his phone and actually does drop it in shock. It’s after eleven. He has less than one hour of morning left to him, to pack up and apologize to the Toziers and get on the road. They won’t arrive at Ben’s until five at the earliest, maybe closer to six depending on which route Richie takes, which they still haven’t discussed. They should have discussed that last night. At the moment Eddie is about ready to cram everything in his suitcases and high-tail it out of the state of Connecticut.

But he’s also a grown man, and not a teenager who humiliated himself in a high school cafeteria. And he’s gonna have to get up.

Eventually. Maybe when his ribs stop trying to kill him. _Hoo boy,_ this hurts. He searches idly with one hand for the break—no one has shown him X-rays of his own damn chest, which considering he knows he has to have had like a million while he was out, seems like an oversight—but he knows it’s where the sharp pain comes from, when he breathes or coughs or laughs or—god forbid, sneezes. The stab wound is a dull and constant pain, much like the bruises around it, but deep inside his body.

He feels… fragile. Thinking about his breathing too much has never been good for him—gave him that pinhole trachea sensation, his throat closing up, _you’re going to fucking die, Eddie_. Now he can’t get a breath, but the issue is so much deeper down. An inhaler—even a functional inhaler—what’s that gonna do for his dented and punctured torso? He feels like a can of stewed tomatoes, dropped off a shelf and onto a spike. How’s a little spray of water and camphor gonna compete with that?

He used to get gas bubbles in his chest all the time when he was a kid—no idea why, just part of being alive—but he remembers how afraid he was of pain in those days, because he had no experience with it and his mother told him every day (every. Day.) how afraid she was of him getting hurt. He knew that if he breathed in the bubble would pop and the pain would be worse—sharper, scarier—in that second, and then it would fade, but he was afraid of the hurt, so he just breathed shallowly until the pain came in at him with its fuzzy edges and then he backed away from it, hyperventilating. Sometimes he wouldn’t even notice that the gas bubble had gone away on its own because he was too afraid to breathe deep enough to feel it.

Pain is… less frightening now. He knows what obliterating pain is now—pain in the sense that it whites you out, pain in the sense that it collapses the walls of arteries and veins and capillaries, nothing to rebuild there, but somehow your body still tries to tell you something’s wrong. _I know_ , he says to his body. _I know, and it’s gonna be okay._

 _It’s gonna hurt, and it’s gonna be okay._ Not even _but_ , the “being okay” part of it is not a consolation prize, not something that he earns _for_ his pain and his hurt, not a conditional or a contrary thought, not a balancing scale. Two parallel lines. The _I hurt_ doesn’t interfere with _I’m okay._ The _I’m okay_ doesn’t diminish the _I hurt_.

_I’m not bad._

Eddie takes a deep breath and feels the sharp shooting pain from the center of his chest. That’s not the stab wound—It didn’t have the decency to hit him symmetrically, the stupid fucking thing—it’s where Richie’s hands pushed down on his chest and his rib separated from his sternum, cartilage and bone. By the time Eddie woke up the bruises in the shape of Richie’s palm— _Richie and Stan trying to hold his life in his body, his blood, his soul_ —faded brown and green and yellow, broken blood vessels coming back in all the colors of spring. Now the bruising is concentrated down and slightly to the side, creating a frame for the stab wound.

He can’t look at that. He knows it’s a puncture wound; he knows it went all the way through him; he knows that if he has to contemplate a new hole in his body and the ideas of where he was sewn up and reconstructed (thank you, Sovereign Light Hospital) he’ll have a vasovagal response. That’s not weakness, that’s just his body going _Hey, we’ve noticed something is really, really wrong, and we’re gonna have a response to that that we feel is appropriate, so buckle up, motherfucker._ Eddie can get pissed at the way his asthma attacks— _panic_ attacks used to happen randomly, but considering he literally died from what It did to him, he’s gonna cut his body some slack when it comes to the survival impulse regarding the impalement. Panic attacks just make him feel like he’s dying for no good reason. Eddie has a lot of feelings, and now that he’s forty he’s going to have to learn how not to die from them.

Oddly this cheers him. He may have humiliated himself in front of Maggie Tozier, and possibly Richie’s dad depending on whether or not he woke up, and definitely Richie himself—but he won’t die of embarrassment. And he doesn’t think he’s having a panic attack either, so that’s a plus.

He picks his phone up off the mattress and checks his notifications. There are several messages in the group chat—responses to him sending Richie’s baby pictures over—and then one message from _Richie Tozier_.

_if you’re gonna shower wait a bit the hot water refills really slow_

The timestamp on this message says it came in just after nine in the morning. Which means that Eddie has officially slept later than Richie. Eddie is beginning to understand that he might never have been an early bird as he believed, he just had an intensely regulated sleep schedule that, as soon as he broke it, now seems as distant as the moon. But he always took some level of pride in seeing sunrises—balm for the early riser—and now the knowledge that he’s running behind _Richie_ of all people grieves him.

He lets his head thunk back down onto the perfectly fluffy pillow. Would it be better or worse if Richie acknowledged… any of what happened last night? Or does he, like Eddie, not know where to start? Or, and this last one seems unlikely, has Richie at last acquired a sense of decorum that stops him from having difficult conversations over text message?

Yeah, probably not. Eddie sees two options before him: one, that Richie pretends that it didn’t happen, writes it off as a side effect of Eddie’s injury and drug delirium, just like Eddie waking up post-surgery to tell him he loves him, and Richie’s going to pretend his kindness never happened either, just like calling Eddie _sweetheart_ and kissing him on the forehead.

Or—and this one is the acute pain, compared to the aching itching chest pain of pretending it didn’t happen—Eddie’s going to be trapped in a car with Richie for the next five, possibly six hours. Cars create a false sense of intimacy—the necessity of not looking in each other’s faces, the motion allowing people to feel they’re moving forward in a conversation, making progress, _making great strides_.

In other words: Eddie’s choices are the unstoppable force of Richie’s new (used) Subaru, or the immovable object of Richie’s emotional opacity.

He opens the group chat and almost spitefully reads through the Losers’ mass hilarity at Richie’s baby pictures. Stan confirms that, yes, that is his cat.

Ben Hanscom: _What was its name?_

Stanley Uris: _Phyllis._

There are coos and heart images over Phyllis Uris the cat (god, what a terrible name), and a _your mom is so pretty!_ from Bev, and at some point Richie stormed in with _yeah yeah yeah yuk it up do the rest of you even have baby pictures_

William Denbrough: _Yes, but they’re all extremely depressing._

The air goes out of Eddie’s chest like he’s been kicked in the stomach, which was probably what Bill intended. He can’t imagine having a sibling—can’t imagine an ally in the house with him and his mother. Even his father is an obscure memory, too faint to have left an impression, in the way that his presence shaped Sonia’s behavior like a rock in a stream. And a younger sibling, like Bill had—well, Eddie put up with a lot from his mother, but he think he’d probably have had an ulcer by sixteen, trying to run interference between her and someone else, someone smaller, someone who _needed_ him.

That’s part of why being in the Toziers’ house as an adult, conscious to these dynamics, feels so alien. Maggie scolded Richie frequently in front of his friends, and Eddie always went rigid when it happened, but either the issues seemed to blow over quickly or Bill, Stan, and Eddie were asked politely to leave. Maggie never wailed over him in front of his friends; Maggie sent them away as Richie’s punishment or because they were distracting, but she never blamed them for what Richie did and claimed it was their fault for _corrupting_ him or getting him dirty, and she never seemed to have an issue with them the next time Eddie saw her. She was… nice. To Eddie, to the rest of them. She was a nice mom.

It’s part of why the conversation from last night sits so ill with him. He had half a mind to call Mike last night before he went to bed, turning the phone over in his hand, listening to the hushed and indistinguishable voices of Richie and Maggie talking in the next room. Mike said that the residents of Derry are experiencing _consequences_ for the first time, and isn’t that interesting? Except it seems to result in Mike getting shit on at his job for something that isn’t his fault, and the Toziers seemed… oddly calm with the idea of raising a child who was bullied by a mass murderer. Not someone who went on to be a mass murderer, either. Someone who actually was a mass murderer at the time he was bullying Richie, as far as either Dr. or Mrs. Tozier know. Wentworth asked Richie what he had done to make Bowers chase him, and Richie had plenty of inciting incidents—Richie was always drawing attention to himself—but not always. Bowers and his gang never needed the excuse, but they liked it when Richie gave it to them.

Eddie startles when he reads further down and discovers that Patty Uris is in the group chat. The little display of contacts—no photos, all gray circles—is too tightly packed for Eddie to have counted them, but now he opens it up and checks. All six of the other Losers, and Patricia Blum Uris. Audra Phillips is not in the text chat. Eddie doesn’t know why that fills him with relief, but it does.

What Patty has sent looks like a phone camera’s image of a photograph from an album; there’s a glare on it that looks like plastic film. It’s of Stan, blond and skinny and tall for a toddler, holding a broom. He’s wearing a blue T-shirt, a diaper, and a single blue sock. There are several little emoticon images attached to the photo.

Richie Tozier: _patty uris run away with me_

Patricia Blum Uris: _No thank you!_

Stanley Uris: _Eddie, you know what you have to do._

Eddie snorts a little as he reads it. There are a number of broad photo binders on the shelves in this room, but Eddie has a sense that going through them would be a kind of violation. Photographs set out on display are one thing, but he’s not about to go rummaging through the family albums, especially not after how he embarrassed himself in front of Maggie last night. He might never be getting invited back, but he’s not gonna dig himself any deeper either.

Fortified with the knowledge that humiliation won’t kill him and the image of baby Stan, Eddie resigns himself to taking a shower and gets up. He doesn’t want Richie to have to pick the bandage off him again—disgusting—but he definitely broke out in a cold sweat while he was vomiting last night, and he’s already slept at least eight hours with it cooling and drying over his stitches and injury. He has to wash himself. _And_ he needs a clean button-down shirt.

Eddie texts Richie: _I need a clean shirt and you to get the bandage on my back, can you meet me in the bathroom?_ He even hears the loud ding from beyond the bedroom door as Richie’s phone receives the text message.

The animated ellipsis bubbles while Richie types his response: _can do pikachu_

Eddie stares at that, wondering what that’s supposed to mean and trying to imagine Richie saying it out loud. Is it a question? He feels like it should be a question. Where does the intonation go? Is Richie making a lewd joke about Pikachu?

Whatever. Richie will show up in the bathroom or he won’t.

Eddie puts his pajama shirt back on, grabs his toiletry bag—shampoo and conditioner, special soap for his incisions, _pills_ —and clean pants, underwear, and socks, and opens the door to the blue room like he’s getting ready to jump off a cliff.

Wentworth Tozier is immediately visible in the armchair in the corner. “Good morning, sunshine,” he says, so uncannily like Richie that Eddie is momentarily shaken. His voice is hoarse, but the intonation is exactly the same as Richie used in the car.

“Good morning,” Eddie replies awkwardly, averting his eyes. His progress across the living room is excruciatingly slow. He can’t see Richie from this angle, but he can see Maggie Tozier sitting at her glass-topped kitchen table. There are three curlers in her hair, just on the crown of her head instead of on the sides, and Eddie’s almost embarrassed to see them so he just fixes his gaze on Richie’s graduation photo and continues on his quest. He can hear Maggie and Richie talking clearly enough.

“Oh wait, he’s awake,” Maggie says, and there’s the scrape of a chair across the floor. Eddie recoils as she comes out of the kitchen and says, “Good morning, Eddie!” but she’s not making a beeline for him, she’s walking toward the TV unit where the CD player and its speakers are kept.

“Good morning,” he says again, and swallows. “I’m, uh, sorry about last night.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Maggie says. “If you’re up, that means we can play music without worrying about waking you. You needed the rest after that, I figured.” She stoops and hits a few buttons on the machine. “Get ready, Rich.”

“Oh hell yes,” Richie says. Eddie has no idea what that means and whether he should be heading for cover.

A very familiar piano riff rolls out of the speaker.

“What,” Eddie says flatly, completely involuntarily.

The piano riff rolls again.

Richie shouts, “Whoo!” from the kitchen as Bob Seger starts up.

“No, no, absolutely not,” Eddie says, not meaning to be rude about Maggie’s taste in music, but he knows what’s about to happen, and he’s absolutely right.

Richie skids out of the tiled kitchen and onto the carpet, trips, and falls into the leg-spread position from _Risky Business_. His entrance is late, he can’t get his knee high up enough for the kick and turn, but he tries.

“No,” Eddie says loudly, and points at Richie as Richie beams at him, mercifully fully-dressed. “No, no, no, fuck you, you are forty years old, this is 2016, I’m taking a fucking shower. _Fuck_ you.” He points once more at Richie, who looks _delighted_ , and then remembers Maggie and Wentworth still in the room. He lowers his hand, clears his throat, and says, “Thank you for your hospitality,” before he creeps toward the bathroom as fast as he can.

Richie’s laughter is completely out of time with the music and it cuts through the door just as clearly.

* * *

By the time that Eddie lets himself fall into the passenger seat of the Subaru, he’s been awake for maybe an hour and he’s freaking exhausted. The Toziers do not exist in silence, and Maggie had music on shuffle—an eclectic mix, less than half of which Eddie recognized—so Eddie could hear the mechanical switching of CDs in the player. Wentworth reiterated his offer to pull some strings with the local dentist community to get Eddie’s tooth seen to. And to cap it all off, Richie breezed in and pulled the bandage off Eddie’s back as casually as Eddie might unzip Myra’s dress when they got home from a formal event, left him the watch shirt on the closed toilet seat, and then threatened to cook breakfast for him.

It’s a lot. Eddie has to eat before he can take his prescriptions, but he took the Dramamine on an empty stomach, and he’s just waiting for the sudden fuzziness to hit him like a blow to the back of the head.

Richie closes the trunk of the car and comes back around to say his goodbyes to his parents. Eddie feels awkward watching that, so he looks into the side mirror for lack of anything better to do as Richie hugs his mother. They were arguing about music streaming services back in the house, and Eddie doesn’t know what to do with a Richie who’s solicitous to others—fixing tea, scooping ice cream, assuring his mother that he would pay for her to have premium accounts if it meant she would stop using a CD player in the year of our lord 2016 (Richie’s words; Wentworth said drily, “5576 in the year of my lord, thanks”; Richie: “I can’t count that high”), brandishing a spatula at Eddie and threatening to cook for him.

It’s—not surprising, or it shouldn’t be surprising, considering how Richie’s been all but waiting on Eddie hand and foot since even before he got out of the hospital. It’s just that watching him do the same for his parents—for his relatively healthy parents—makes Eddie feel simultaneously better about it and worse. Better because it means that Richie’s not taking pity on Eddie; but worse because it makes Eddie… a little jealous. He can’t wash his hair without thinking about Richie’s hands on his head in the hospital; the idea that this might just be who Richie became after twenty-seven years apart, that he would do this if, for instance, _Ben_ had been injured in the final showdown with It…

It’s a messy knot of feelings and Eddie doesn’t have the emotional strength to tease the whole thing out, but his brain is desperate for anything to focus on other than the blistering embarrassment of his interactions with Maggie and Wentworth Tozier. So it picks over Eddie’s selfishness, comparing and contrasting Richie’s casual _just helping you out, bro_ moments with Sonia and Myra’s babying, testing the possibility that Eddie seeks this out because he _likes_ being taken care of despite all his protests, because something in him _craves_ it—

Wentworth Tozier knocks on the window. Eddie blinks and, because the car’s off and he can’t roll the glass down, opens the door slightly.

“Just wanted to ask you what route you’re taking,” Wentworth says calmly, bracing his elbow on the side of the car and holding a fingertip over his stoma. The angle looks uncomfortable, but Eddie can’t get up so they can communicate like two adult men instead of one stooping dentist and one child.

“I-90 West,” Eddie replies, unsure why he’s being asked this instead of Richie. The shotgun position is traditionally the navigator’s role, but everyone knows that Eddie’s going to fall asleep basically as soon as the car starts moving, and Eddie is honestly kind of looking forward to it.

Wentworth nods but asks, “Not 17 West?”

Eddie shakes his head. “That’s like, over fifty miles longer.”

“But the tolls,” Went says. “Do you have money for the tolls?”

“Yes,” Richie says calmly over the hood of the car.

“Cash?” Wentworth presses.

“Yes, we have cash for the tolls—how do you think we got here, old man?” Richie asks.

“Do you need more?”

“Where was this when I was eleven and begging for movie ticket money?”

Wentworth straightens up. “I just want you to be safe.”

“I promise, we will be extremely safe,” Richie says. “With Eds in the car, there’s no way anything even remotely fun could happen.”

“Fuck you,” Eddie says automatically, and then cringes. “Sorry.”

“No, you’ve made your position quite clear,” Wentworth says, apparently unfazed. He takes a step back from the car. “Just wanted to check.”

Maggie crouches and waves at Eddie through the windshield. Eddie waves back. Richie gets into the car and adjusts the seat position relative to the pedals, despite the fact that no one but him has driven the car. Maybe he got leg cramps from driving yesterday. The fact that Eddie can’t offer to take a shift, to pull his own weight, is frustrating, but it’s nothing new. When Richie turns the key in the ignition something unknots in Eddie’s gut and he leans back a little in the chair.

Richie reverses and slowly guides the car out of the drive. Eddie doesn’t even have anything to complain about regarding his technique or his mirrors. There are little red reflective markers posted up and down either side of the driveway. Maggie waves the whole way, and Wentworth stands with his arms folded across his chest as Richie slowly turns and gets them back on the road.

Turning onto the road with the pond, Richie asks, “So do you want to stop at a diner, or do you want to get breakfast at a gas station?”

Eddie considers the pros and cons of a gas station breakfast. “I don’t think I’m ready for that yet,” he says.

“What, eating?”

“No, eating at a gas station.”

“Diner it is,” Richie says. He doesn’t put his hands together, but he does the _I Dream of Jeannie_ head wobble again. _As you wish._

* * *

About an hour after breakfast—brunch, really—when Eddie is feeling pleasantly sleepy without the urgency, and Richie has a playlist called “Maybe Not” on in the background, subtle and mellow, Richie pipes up. “Can I ask you something?”

Eddie goes alert the way you do when you fall asleep too fast and your body worries that your dropping heart rate means you’re dying. He doesn’t know what he’s expecting— _Did you want me to sleep in the bed with you?_ or _Are you okay with my parents considering all the weird shit that happened with your mom?_ or _Hey, when you said you love me, did you mean…?_

“Yeah,” Eddie manages, the word coming out of him with the same sucking tension as a clog releasing from a drain. The Dramamine is working, so his brain’s not as clear as it might be, but he doesn’t feel nauseated or anything.

“Why do you think It chose us?”

That’s not what Eddie expected. Not at all. He shouldn’t feel relieved when talking about the evil space clown, but he kind of does, in a secret guilty way. And to think he was sulking earlier about Richie’s reluctance to talk about anything of substance, and now he’s grateful for it.

“I mean,” Richie says, filling the silence as Eddie considers, “It had to appear to the others, too. That was Its thing—Mike talked about—about his dad seeing it at the Black Spot, and about the Bradley Gang shootout, It was there, It appeared to—and Bev said that It attacked Hockstetter as… as leeches or something—it’s not that It was only tormenting us, is all. It’s not like we were special there.”

Eddie has been dwelling on the meaning of _special_ today but this is worse, somehow.

“And we were all only children, except Bill,” Richie says. “But Bill was always—”

He takes one hand off the wheel and gestures, indicating Bill’s general exceptionalism. Eddie nods, understanding—Bill admitted in a way that he treated Eddie like a little brother, like Georgie once Georgie was gone. But Eddie never felt like that—he remembered going along with Bill to pick up Georgie from the grade school on their way home, just part of the stop, just part of what you did if you wanted to walk home with Big Bill, so Eddie biked along and watched Georgie clamber up behind Bill on Silver and wrap his little arms around his shoulders, and Bill took it so for granted that it looked like Georgie was an extension of him, just something Bill had to do to make sure all of himself got home. Georgie was always happy to see them, happy to see Bill’s friends, happy to be included: _Hiya, Eddie! How are ya?_ And Eddie felt shades of that sometimes, just happy to run with Big Bill.

He never felt like his inclusion was that effortless, that automatic, with anyone except the Losers. That’s why he loved them as ferociously as he did—being caught alone was one thing, but being caught by bullies, by monsters, by whatever the world could throw at them was never so bad. Eddie was scared for himself, certainly, but he was always _furious_ whenever anyone messed with the rest of them.

He remembers, dimly, Richie falling silent mid-taunt, his eyes rolling back up in his head and his jaw falling open, and realizing what had happened, and thinking, _You fucker, you bitch, put him down, he’s mine. I’ll show you._

“And it was weird, for parents back in the seventies, to just have one. I mean, not my parents, I was the reason they stopped,” Richie quips, unable to take himself totally seriously, “but I know Mom always wanted a daughter, and I don’t know why they didn’t try.”

“I don’t know what I’d have done if I had a brother or sister,” Eddie says softly. He thinks about it sometimes, usually in the moments when he and Myra are dwelling on their inability to have children. Thinks about the exemplary model of parenting set by Sonia Kaspbrak.

He would have died in that house, he thinks. Eddie’s not a man’s man, he’s a doormat, you can walk all over him, but if he had someone who belonged to him like that… He doesn’t think he could have stood around and watched them be devoured. Bill certainly didn’t. And it wouldn’t have mattered, in the moment, if Sonia only ate her children because she loved them. Eddie would allow things to happen to him that he’d never tolerate happening to someone else. He’d have done whatever he had to in order to get them out, and then he’d have stayed and played the dutiful son to Sonia to make up for it.

“I’d have been smothered in my sleep by the time I was six,” Richie says confidently, like he’s thought about it before. “I think even if I had a sister, like as soon as that girl was walking she would have been like, ‘I’ve had enough of this fucker’ and done what she had to do for the good of humanity.”

Eddie stares at him. Richie’s still gazing out the windshield but his eyes are far away. Mercifully the interstate looks relatively clear; they might even get to Ben’s before dinnertime at this rate, though Eddie’s not about to jinx them by voicing the thought out loud.

“I think we had to be lonely,” Richie says. “To fight It. I think we had to—to be ready to—to kill for each other, at thirteen. You remember when Ben and Bev and Mike came in.”

Eddie does—the sudden feeling of rightness, of something snapping into place, pieces made to fit. Ben and Beverly and Mike belonged, in the way that some kid pulled from their class just wouldn’t fit. Losers for life, and all that.

Eddie wonders how he can just have come from that house, with those congenial parents who behave just like him, and no doubt be dwelling on the childhood he hasn’t thought about since he actually experienced it, and conclude that he was lonely. _Eddie_ was lonely, in that house with Sonia. Frank wasn’t even a ghostly presence; he wasn’t making jokes to Eddie, there was no established back-and-forth. Eddie feels like he barely spoke in his house except to say _Sorry, Mommy, I love you, Mommy_ for the first eighteen years of his life. Richie was allowed to have _friends_ over, provided he behaved, and the boundaries for what constituted acceptable behavior were far wider for Richie than they ever were for Eddie. Hell, Eddie just cussed Richie out in front of his parents over no greater provocation than _Bob Seger_ , and the Toziers are still being nice to him.

“I wasn’t lonely,” Eddie says. Not where it mattered, anyway.

Richie glances at him quickly, not turning his head all the way. Eddie looks at the shape of Richie’s nose, the newness of it in three-quarters view, and something in his chest tightens down possessively. _Kiss him,_ Eddie thinks, but it’s not the moment.

“No?” Richie asks. “I figured that was the teenage condition. _Nobody understands me, everybody hates me, I’m actually…_ ” He shrugs, falling out of his faint whine. “…Luke Skywalker and I’m about to be caught up in the adventure of a lifetime because of who I’ve actually been the whole time.”

Eddie frowns at him. “You were never Luke Skywalker,” he says.

Something in Richie’s face goes sharp and alert and watchful, though he’s still not looking at Eddie. It’s the _you’ve set me up for a punchline and I’m waiting to take it_ face. “Who was I?” he prompts, voice tilting like he knows the answer already.

Eddie can’t remember having a crush on Harrison Ford when he first saw the _Star Wars_ movies, but he absolutely knows that Richie wants to tease him about it. “Chewbacca,” Eddie replies calmly. “You got like really hairy in high school, dude, it was fucking horrific.” And _tall_ and his voice changed and he made weird noises with the slightest provocation.

Richie, happy as ever to be roasted by Eddie, laughs, but it’s not his out-of-control, _Eds gets off a good one_ laugh.

“And I don’t think the bad guy chooses the hero,” Eddie says. “Darth Vader didn’t pick Luke.”

“Technically, Darth Vader _made_ Luke,” Richie says. “Probably not with that intention, but like—It definitely made Bill.”

And that’s true. If It hadn’t taken Georgie Denbrough, Eddie doesn’t know what would have happened to Eddie. Maybe they’d all have known that something was wrong in Derry, but they’d have put it out of mind the way that everyone in Derry did when one person wronged another, when a kid went missing, when it was revealed that the Corcoran kid hadn’t gone missing at all but had been done in by his stepfather because he knew that he’d be able to get away with it. Maybe Eddie would be—

—would be in an office building in New York right now, at his job, getting ready to go home to his wife and eat dinner in silence; because if It had never happened to him, Eddie would have the exact same life he had when he forgot about It, except he’d never have had those crazy spurts of unknown bravery. There would have been no need for them.

He’s not grateful for It, so much. But he thinks he understands a little bit more about who he is in the dark than most of his coworkers know about themselves. Growing up in Derry was a life-or-death situation, and most of the population doesn’t know much about that on any given day. That’s the kind of thing that happens to soldiers in war zones or women pursued on their walks home at night. Eddie grew up _hunted_ and now he’s remembering this about himself. Now he knows what he does when caught.

Would any random child plucked off the street—not one of the Lucky Seven—would they have reacted the same way? If it was the rest of the six of them, but Eddie was swapped out for some random kid…

He can’t even remember their names, now. Could he have been replaced so easily?

“I mean—do you think it was anything we did?” Richie asks. “That made It come after us? Do you think we were just in the wrong place at the wrong time, do you think it was because we were never at home, do you think it was because we went off by ourselves, do you think…?” Richie shrugs. What makes a monster hunter at thirteen?

What’s Richie saying? That It should have killed the other kid? The kid who didn’t listen to his mother and walk home from school with a buddy and adhere to the curfew and stay at home when it rains because you could get sick going out in weather like that, look what happened to the Denbrough boy?

The muscle pulses in Richie’s jaw and Eddie understands all at once: _And why’d he chase you? Richie, when you were a kid nothing was ever your fault._

Eddie almost says, _It wasn’t your fault! You were eleven!_

But that’s not the kind of response Richie’s looking for. Eddie has the curious sensation of coaxing some injured animal toward him so he can get it to help, like a feral cat or a fox or something. If Eddie just grabs for the wound Richie’s gonna startle away, misdirect, make a joke out of it. _And now, for my final trick: I will disappear._

“No,” Eddie says with certainty. Too certain.

Richie glances at him again, expression dubious.

“No,” Eddie says again, remembering the way he’d just be trying to walk to class and Belch Huggins would descend on him. It wasn’t because Eddie dressed in shorts and pink polos, because when he tried dressing differently in high school that didn’t make a difference, didn’t stop the kids whispering that he was a sissy, a queerboy, as if that meant anything at ten years old, as if any of them had even the nerve to reach out and hold someone else’s hand at ten years old, boy or girl. “It was just… what we were. We were kids, It ate kids, It tried to eat us. It wasn’t anything we did, it was just… The remarkable thing,” Eddie says, changing his tactic mid-sentence, “is not that It went after us, it’s that there were seven of us It couldn’t kill. That we just happened to be those kids who…” He shrugs, awkward, and hurts himself, and hisses a little under his breath.

Richie doesn’t react to his little pained sound, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t hear it. “Who were willing to die for each other,” Richie finishes. “And that we grew up, and were still willing to die for each other.”

“Yes,” Eddie says, remembering Bill yanking Mike out of the way, remembering Richie grabbing Eddie by the wrist and running away from the doors, remembering Ben throwing himself on the teenage werewolf, remembering Bev closing one eye and taking aim with the slingshot as they all screamed her on, remembering Stan taking off his cardigan and pressing it to Eddie’s chest, heedless of the danger around them. “Yes.”

“Bad fucking luck for It, then,” Richie says quietly.

“Yes,” he says again. Something in his chest hurts, far deeper than anywhere It could ever manage to dig. The hurt of soap on a wound, cleaning it out, getting it ready for healing. “Good for us, though.”

Richie doesn’t turn his head, but his eyes flick towards Eddie. The corner of his mouth curls a little. That same watchfulness still lurks in his expression. Eddie feels good, feels happy, the opposite of lonely after all these years, but he doesn’t know why there’s still that faint edge of _something_ in Richie’s face. “Yeah,” he says, his voice tinged sardonic. “Good for us.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> EMETOPHOBIA details: Eddie has a nightmare and relives his impalement. It's traumatic enough that he has to go to the bathroom to vomit. In doing so, he wakes up Maggie, who is very nice about it in the face of Eddie's obvious embarrassment, and Richie, who comes up to sit with him.
> 
> You can find me on twitter at @IfItHollers and on tumblr at tthael. If there's any other content you think I need to tag for, _please_ tell me.
> 
> Update:
> 
> Not sure if there's a specific scene that the artist had in mind, but [this painting](https://twitter.com/PickedYou/status/1252682418563231751) by [Kei @PickedYou](https://twitter.com/PickedYou) reminds me the most strongly of sleepy-sick Eddie leaning on Richie in this chapter.


	12. It's Our House

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Eddie bonds with his friends and sets himself up for success.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi! I'm messing with the formatting of chapters a little bit so this one will go up very close to the same time that the next one goes up; please make sure you read this one first! It's a little bit shorter, but this next one is going to be much longer, so please bear with me while I set things up!
> 
> Content warnings: Richie uses gendered words (bitch, slut) very flippantly and gets called out for it; Ben is a white man with a lot of generically Asian décor; brief discussion of Bill's ethnic heritage is based on Jaeden Martell not James McAvoy; mention of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome; mention of suicide and suicide attempt (Stan); one of Patty's elementary school students has come out as a transboy and is having some difficulty with the administration, but his classmates are all very supportive; lots of discussion of food; Richie responds to correction in a way that's suggestive of Rejection-Sensitive Dysphoria; Patty makes a phone sex joke about informed consent.

As soon as they come in sight of Ben’s house, both Eddie and Richie incline their heads in a slouch to peer at it from under the windshield. They look at it for long moments—Ben’s car parked outside in the driveway, Silver leaned up against the front steps. It is without a doubt the right place.

“Huh,” Richie says aloud.

Not that there could be any doubt that it’s the right place. Richie can follow directions adequately, though Eddie read them off his phone just in case the GPS made a mistake. Every time there was a slight differentiation between what Ben texted him and what the friendly AI voice suggested Richie do, Eddie narrowed his eyes at it in suspicion. Richie made _I, Robot_ jokes. Eddie knows he watched that during his Academy Award phase, but he doesn’t think he’s watched it since, so his memory tried to supplement the blanks with what context clues Richie provided him, and after a certain point Eddie started to suspect Richie was making shit up to fuck with him.

Moreover, they know that it’s definitely Ben’s house, because they can _see into it_ , because the house is all glass on one side. Just big windows. Eddie is fascinated, but in the same way that moves him to rubberneck when he sees car accidents, despite knowing that distracted driving is extremely dangerous.

“And he’s… an architect,” Eddie says slowly.

The visibility isn’t great in _every_ room of the house—Eddie assumes that there are rooms, that Ben’s cabin in the woods isn’t just one massive sleek-chic studio apartment—but where the lights are on he can see in clearly. And—yep, Ben’s waving at them.

Richie parks the car with less attentiveness than Eddie would prefer, but it’s hard to blame him because they’re both staring at the affront to privacy that Ben calls home. As soon as he switches off the engine Richie leans back in the driver’s seat and just stares.

“Are we sure that Ben’s, uh… good at his job?” Richie asks. “Because, like, I saw the reviews for the BBC tower, I just figured that was everybody hating skyscrapers, but it looks like…”

“Did Ben really want to be a glassblower?” Eddie asks, craning his neck. He saw the BBC tower stuff too and paid it very little mind, just noting how shiny and metropolitan it looked, and that the critics seemed entirely too vehement in their responses—like the judge from Pink Floyd’s _The Wall_ screaming that Ben’s tower _filled him with the urge to defecate_. It was a public building, a publicity thing.

This is a house. Where Ben lives. And Eddie understands why the house is in the woods, because otherwise Ben’s “hermit architect” schtick would be instead extremely public.

“Are we sure he’s an architect?” Richie asks. “Because I don’t want to be a bitch about this, but that’s a rectangle.”

Eddie tilts his head and looks at the edges of the building. “It’s more of a lozenge?” he offers.

In his peripheral vision, Eddie sees Richie turn his head very slowly, as though Eddie has just announced that he kind of likes Ben’s greenhouse for people.

“Because of the corners,” Eddie says, blushing despite himself. “They’re rounded. It’s like a—shut up, it’s not a drug thing.”

“A drug thing?” Richie repeats, the beginnings of a laugh in his voice. “Because if I was gonna say a drug thing about Ben’s house, I’d say that he should be supplementing his income growing _weed_ , man, look at that, look at all the sun, nobody’s gonna come out here and bust him.”

“How much do you think he pays to heat it in the winter?” Eddie asks. All the glass means it has to be so subject to ambient weather; it must be blistering in the summer, too. Ben can’t possibly stay here during the winter, he has to have other houses in warmer climes, you just can’t live like this in a New England winter.

“Is Bev moving in with him?” Richie asks. “Because, like, she’s a _redhead_. She is _going_ to get sunburned indoors here.”

Ben opens the front door and immediately Eddie plasters a big smile on his face and waves. In his peripheral vision he can see that Richie is doing the same thing.

“Do you hate it?” Eddie asks through his gritted teeth.

“I kind of hate it,” Richie replies, tense tone suggesting he’s doing the same thing.

“Oh boy.” Because if Richie thinks there’s something to make fun of here, he’s not going to keep quiet about it. And Eddie’s not ready to be rude to Ben about the house that he’s generously letting him stay in while he gets back on his feet, but he also knows that Richie’s going to make him laugh about it. He reflexively puts a hand on his chest, preparing for the pain.

“What?” Richie asks immediately.

It takes Eddie a second to realize that Richie thinks he’s in pain _now_. “Nothing,” Eddie says.

But Richie doesn’t push. Ben’s coming down the steps, and Bev is following. They get out of the car and a deep ache in Eddie’s knees makes itself known as soon as he stands and puts his weight on his feet. Also his ass is numb. He’s never had pins and needles in his ass before.

“Hey,” Ben says brightly. “How was your trip?”

Bev asks, “How many baby pictures did you smuggle out of the Toziers’ house?”

Eddie smiles at that and accepts the hugs they gingerly dispense to him. He’s never been touched so frequently, let alone by so many people. It’s still awkward—he isn’t really sure how to hold his shoulders when Ben approaches him with outstretched arms, isn’t sure how to _receive_ affection so much—but it’s kind of nice too. Clearly they don’t want to hurt him, they’re very careful with the strength of their arms and where they place their hands, but every time Eddie feels something along the line of his spine relax. Like he could lean into them, if he wanted. It’s new.

“If you want to see pictures of me in a bathtub or naked in the backyard, you can just ask,” Richie says. For a moment Eddie makes the completely natural assumption that Richie is offering to take nude photos of himself _now_ , but then Richie goes on: “Mags got real into scrapbooking in like 2005. There’s like, a display of me as a four-year-old committing public indecency. She put a leaf sticker over my dick.”

Eddie snorts at the idea of Maggie censoring baby pictures like Roman statues, but winces at the same time. “I don’t think you should call a four-year-old’s penis a dick,” he says.

“Well, pardon me, Dr. K, but I think if anyone gets to decide what I call my junk, it’s me,” Richie says.

Bev starts giggling suddenly and they all look at her. She looks down at her bare feet—her toenails are painted navy—in something like shame. “Little Richie,” she almost whispers.

Eddie holds his chest to brace himself, laughing.

“But it turns out, I’m taking suggestions,” Richie says, switching gears immediately. He looks around at the group and then says, “Oh shit, Little Richie and Big Ben.”

“And we’re done with that,” Ben says diplomatically, turning to Eddie. “How do you feel?”

Eddie scrunches his eyes shut and grits his teeth and trembles with the effort not to laugh out loud and aggravate his broken ribs. This results in vague snuffling snorting noises. He’s afraid to open his eyes to see Richie’s smug expression. “Fine,” he manages, his voice high.

“Hey, Ben, so, did you design this house? And was it a way to try to sublimate a desire to have sex in public places? Because like—”

“Eddie, we’ve missed you so much,” Ben says flatly. “And Richie, you’ll be sleeping in the car, right?”

Eddie gives in and laughs, leaning on the Subaru to support himself. When he opens his eyes little black dots spark over his field of vision and then clear after a moment.

He’s considering the logistics now. If Ben and Bev are taking off to… the Bahamas, or Switzerland, or wherever people go to hide from their abusive husbands while filing for divorce (he might be thinking of offshore bank accounts), he’s gonna be here in this glass house with just Richie. Which is something that he’s been considering with a mixture of anticipation and anxiety since Richie first proposed the idea, but now he’s considering that having no human contact other than a professional comedian might actually kill him.

God, his chest hurts. And he’s stupidly tired considering he’s done nothing all day except sit in the car and digest biscuits and gravy from the diner.

The biscuits and gravy were very good. He doesn’t want to know what’s in gravy, but it tasted really good in the moment. He’s adding _breakfast gravy_ (not to be confused with _Thanksgiving dinner gravy_ ) to his new list of approved foods.

Everyone is looking at him with a certain amount of concern that they all quickly try to diguise when they realize he can see it.

“I’m fine,” he says. “Thanks for letting us stay.”

“Of course,” Ben says, blinking in something like surprise. Like he would just let anyone walk in off the street and into his shiny shiny house. Like opening doors for people is second nature to him.

God, is it just Eddie who grew up selfish? Is he missing something here? He knew that as a husband he kind of sucked, but between Richie and Ben he’s starting to wonder if he’s missing out on some serious empathy/generosity gene. With that in mind, he insists on grabbing his toiletry bag and his electric blanket out of the car.

“You don’t have to,” Ben says, like he’s going to serve as bellhop on top of everything else.

Eddie squints at him, daring Ben to take his belongings out of his hands.

Ben holds up both hands in the universal sign for _get down with your bad self, crazy person_.

Bev makes him feel slightly better, because she grabs Richie’s duffel and when Richie says, “Uh, Molly Ringwald, you—” she just beeps him and follows Eddie.

There’s no safety railing around the deck itself. Eddie’s just happy that there’s a rail on the stairs, because he definitely needs it. He touches Silver’s handlebars with a fingertip as he passes. Just to say hi, kind of; or maybe for luck.

He’s maybe three steps into hiking up the stairs before he realizes that Bev is very close behind him. “Oh, sorry,” he says, shuffling to the side so if she wants to walk around him she can. He knows he’s moving slowly.

“Nah, I’m good,” Bev says, and Eddie realizes that she’s following him in case he slips on the steps or collapses.

“Bev, if I fall on you, I’m big enough I’m gonna hurt you,” he says, alarmed.

Bev’s tone is extremely unimpressed. “You think you’re gonna collapse?”

“No,” Eddie says quickly.

From the car, Richie shouts, “Maybe she just wants a look at that ass, Kaspbrak!”

Eddie twists around and lets go of the railing so that he can flip Richie off.

It’s a short flight of stairs. Eddie ascends it without a real problem, but he does have to set his toiletry bag down on Ben’s deck table and sit in one of his deck chairs when he’s up there. He holds the electric blanket in his lap, convinced in some way that because a blanket is an _indoor_ thing that if it touches the _outdoor_ furniture it will become unsuitable for its purpose. There are heating coils in it so he doesn’t know how to clean it.

“Taking a break?” Bev asks.

He nods.

“You good?”

He nods again.

“Gotcha.” And that’s it. She ascends the last little flight of steps, opens the front door, and drops Richie’s duffel in the entryway. Eddie can’t decide if that’s because she’s fulfilled the letter of her generous assistance with bringing the luggage inside or because everyone has the urge to hover around him.

He looks at the surface of the table. Ben has a little chess set resting there. There’s no overhang on his weird architectural house to protect his furniture from rain. He really hopes that Ben has some kind of presentation that explains his house to laypersons, because Eddie feels a lot like he did when Mike busted out Shakespeare at the hotel restaurant yesterday—like he’s the uncultured businessman in a group of artists.

He takes his phone out and texts the group chat. _Made it to Ben’s_ , he says, just so that Bill, Mike, Stan, and Patty are all updated.

Patty replies first: _Thank you for letting us know!_

Eddie hears the answering buzzes and dings from Ben’s, Bev’s, and Richie’s phones. Richie gets both of Eddie’s suitcases in his hands and complains theatrically as he drags them up the stairs, but he doesn’t seem to have a real problem hauling them, or fending off Ben who appears to be half-jokingly half-incredibly-seriously trying to take one from him. Eddie watches this like a spectator sport, gets self-conscious about being seen looking at Richie’s biceps, looks back down at his phone, and then remembers that if there’s a spectacle going on he’s allowed to look. So.

“You look flushed,” Ben says when he comes up the steps empty-handed (Richie put his weight on both Eddie’s suitcases and fended Ben off with one leg, which Eddie didn’t think Richie was flexible enough to do at his age considering how he failed at the _Risky Business_ spin this morning).

“I don’t have a fever,” Eddie says so quickly that it doesn’t sound like he’s concealing unprecedented attraction for an adult man who just threatened to _Karate Kid_ crane-kick another adult man. It sounds like he’s concealing an infection in one of his massive life-threatening wounds, while ten hours away from the medical treatment familiar with his case. He feels his face prickle and averts his gaze to look around at the deck. “Did you design this house?”

“Yes,” Ben says easily, and Eddie recognizes that mixture of pride and embarrassment. It’s not like Richie _loudly_ calling Ben gorgeous at the table at the Jade of the Orient; it’s more like the nonchalance with which Ben admitted to building an entire clubhouse complete with rafters and floorboards, just in his free time between school letting out in June and the fourth of July. Eddie is wondering if he can blame whatever magical powers gave Stan psychic abilities for Ben’s instinctive construction abilities, because it explains why all of Eddie’s expectations about how long construction should take are “unreasonable” and “laughable.”

Eddie can’t say he likes the house _now_ , but it’s very modern and very _elegant_. Not quite Eddie’s masculine ideal, but certainly closer to the idea of the billionaire CEO, “the Most Interesting Man in the World” from Dos Equis campaigns, the successful entrepreneur. There were times when Eddie aspired to it—the sleek style, the cleanliness of it, the unbroken visual lines—but if he’s honest, he always felt like he was thinking too hard about it and that diminished any of the “effortlessness” that seemed to be a requirement. He told himself that real men didn’t care about interior decorating that much, and that Myra’s tastes—similarly polished, _classic_ , black and white—meant he could probably leave it to her.

God, Eddie has such fucking issues. Is he gonna have to go out and figure out what _clothes_ he actually likes, not just the ones he feels he’s supposed to wear? Is he gonna have to—

Yes, he is going to have to figure out how to decorate an apartment or a house, because he doesn’t have one to live in and all of his furniture is at the mercy of his wife, who is probably very angry with him right now.

“Holy shit, man,” he says to Ben, because at the moment he doesn’t have a compliment that feels sincere, and he’s not gonna lie to him. It is impressive that Ben builds houses, that Ben took something that was—what, a sketch on paper?—and willed it into existence. Eddie’s never done that, not that he can remember. Ben _creates_. Ben _builds_.

Ben gives a shy little smile, hearing the approval.

Richie thunks both suitcases down onto the deck at the top of the steps. “Behold, Eddie Kaspbrak, sat for ten hours for the opportunity to sit _directly outside_ Ben’s house,” he says.

“Fuck you, Trashmouth,” Bev says immediately. “He’ll sit where he fucking wants.”

“Yeah, I’ll sit where I want!” Eddie agrees, though he knows Richie’s picking a fight just because he’s wound up and antsy from the long car ride, and apparently playing keepaway with Ben hasn’t gotten it out of his system. If Richie wants to play, he’ll play.

Richie doesn’t even go for the obvious, he just says, “Dick joke, dick joke,” and then starts hauling the suitcases up the next two stairs into the house. Bev holds the door open for him, and he gives her an overdramatic wink.

Eddie stands up, there’s a swooping sensation in his head, and he staggers into Ben.

“Whoa,” Ben says, hands coming up to hold Eddie at the elbows. “You okay?”

“Little concerned about the lack of safety rails,” Eddie says through the dizzy spell.

“Hey, what the fuck?” Richie says, not unkindly from behind them.

Eddie doesn’t turn around to look at him, wondering if this will go away or if he needs to sit back down. Is it a blood clot? Is that a thing? His legs feel fine, and the fact that they split up the drive into two legs instead of one long ten-hour trip means that’s less likely, right? He’s sure that he knows the statistics on circulatory problems in long haul truck drivers, he just… can’t remember them right now.

Hands touch his shoulders and Eddie jumps badly. “Shit,” Richie says practically in Eddie’s ear. He’s _so fucking handsy_ , Eddie doesn’t know what to do with it, Ben in front of him and Richie behind him. He tilts his head back and looks up into Richie’s big concerned eyes, and then Eddie fucking gives up and slumps back to put his weight on Richie. He looks sturdier than Ben. “Are you passing out?” Richie asks.

“No,” Eddie says. “Give me a fucking minute, why do you think I was sitting down, asshole?”

“Eddie,” Ben says gently. “Can I touch your forehead?”

Eddie does _not_ want his temperature taken, and palm to face isn’t an accurate measurement of it either. “No, thank you,” he says.

“There’s a thermometer in the first aid kit,” Ben says, glancing up toward the door in what Eddie has to assume is Bev’s general direction.

 _“I do not have an infection,”_ Eddie says, voice pressed out thin and higher than it would be otherwise. He swallows. “I just stood up too fast. I’m fine now.” He straightens up away from Richie—he knows he doesn’t have a fever, because Richie feels _warm_. “Let’s go in the house, I need some water.”

There’s concern in Bev’s face—she’s still holding the door—but she says nothing. Eddie climbs the two steps up to the house, Richie practically on his heels, and internally kicks himself for not doing the polite thing and letting Ben lead them in so he can show them around. Whatever. He needs to be on a couch, like, immediately.

It really looks like the house is one big rectangle. Eddie is confronted with a second small set of stairs leading up onto a landing, and then a regular-sized set of stairs on his right that leads to a lower level. They are, of course, architecturally attractive floating stairs that you can easily lose a sandal or a slipper on. Eddie is just relieved that there are any railings to them at all—simple dark wood slabs like the steps themselves.

“Okay, so it’s a split level,” Ben says. “But most everything is upstairs, Eddie, so you don’t have to worry about that. I was thinking you can take the guest room up here and then when Bev and I leave you can have the master suite; the bathroom’s nicer.”

It looks like Ben has taken “open concept” and run with it. On the left Eddie can see all the way back into what looks like a kitchen—not a big kitchen, but that’s definitely some kind of stainless-steel appliance tucked into a corner. He grabs hold of the railing and hikes up to the first level to look around.

On the right is a living room. The couch is long and low, black leather with alternating black and white throw pillows stacked across it. It’s at least the width of a twin-size bed.

_I’ll be on the couch if you need me._

Eddie shivers a little and finally spots the collapsed blinds to the side of the floor-to-ceiling window—big panels like the ones he’s accustomed to in office buildings, but instead of descending from a height it looks like they can be pulled manually. He’ll have to ask about that—he knows that the ones that unfold from the top of the window frame get stuck on their motors a lot, so the idea of being able to manually darken your room is a good one, but what if they’re also supposed to be automated and Eddie just rips one out of its track? Also, how has that couch gone so long without being sunbleached? It still looks glossy.

The entryway leads into what strikes Eddie as kind of a home office sort of thing. If Ben’s an architect and his home is part of his portfolio, it makes sense that he wants the parts of it on display to be professional and presentable. Inset cabinets bracket either side of a painting that looks like a crane under some kind of swamp tree. Eddie stares at it for a long moment, the black and white obscurity.

“Hey, Ben, I didn’t know you were Asian,” Richie says. Eddie turns around to find he has lifted something off of Ben’s desk, a little statue that could be either a lion or a dog and probably really is neither. If Richie were within arm’s reach Eddie would swat at him again—what if the statue’s not Asian?—but Eddie is also getting real generic Asian vibes just from this crane painting.

Ben looks a little sheepish, rubbing at the back of his neck with a hand. “I’m not, I just did some work in China with a Japanese firm, and then we went to some awards in Thailand. Completely different aesthetics—the Thai awards were fun—but some of the stuff I picked up while I was traveling.” He points at the little statue in Richie’s hand. “The dragon’s from the year I spent in Nanjing.”

Eddie frowns down at the nondescript white cabinets with their birch tops. “Didn’t Bill have a grandma from Korea?” he asks, trying to access deep memory.

Bev and Ben, having met Bill far later than them, frown, but Richie turns around to look at Eddie, his eyes suddenly wide and his face breaking into a grin. “Oh my god, Mrs. Sunny!” he says.

“That was not her name,” Eddie says. “You’re being racist, that was not her name.”

“That’s what she told me to call her!” Richie says. “She had, like—” He holds out one hand and curves his fingers so that his pinkie and thumb point down and his other three fingers reach out. “—old people claws, she like, patted the back of my hand and said some shit about my glasses.”

“She did not,” Eddie says preemptively, taking out his phone and texting Bill to head this off before it becomes a thing. _Was one of your grandmothers from Korea? Why is Richie calling her Mrs. Sunny?_

There are a number of floating ellipses before Bill sends back _THE TURTLE SHIP!!!_

Eddie has no idea what that means but he happens to look over across Ben’s office—he doesn’t even have his desk pressed against a wall, it’s just out in the middle of the room, like a man who truly has no cares in the world—and land his eyes on a giant golden turtle statue.

“What the fuck, Ben?” he asks.

Richie has spotted it too and is cautiously stepping over it to straddle it, then crouching as though he’s going to sit on the turtle and ride it.

“That won’t support your weight,” Ben says casually. He walks past Eddie and Richie without concern about what they might do to his belongings and into the kitchen.

Automatically Eddie looks to Bev for support. She’s still standing by the stairs, her hands clasped loosely behind her back. Eddie thinks of her in her black and white when she arrived at the Jade of the Orient. She’s wearing a faded maroon sweatshirt now. Her hair’s still the brightest thing in the room—including the turtle statue.

Richie is mercifully not sitting on the turtle statue, just hovering over it as close as he can get without his legs giving out. Eddie looks at his thighs in his jeans, blushes, and returns to staring at the crane painting. Something about the vegetation and the way it hangs off the bird—like the bird itself is the trunk of the tree—reminds Eddie of that plant they called bamboo in the Barrens. At least four potted houseplants cluster in the sink directly under the canvas, the tips of their leaves crispy and brown.

Whatever Ben is doing, there are cabinets and what sounds like fridge doors opening and closing. He returns moments later and holds a glass of water out to Eddie. Eddie takes it, a little startled. The water is cold and he sips it gratefully.

“You can take a seat if you want,” Ben says. “Make yourself at home.” He glances at Bev when he says that, but Bev seems to be content to lean on the stair rail and watch Eddie and Richie look around. She has a contemplative expression that makes Eddie immediately self-conscious, though he doesn’t understand why. He sits in the rolling desk chair more for self-preservation than anything else.

Bill texts him: _Sorry, that was something else, yes I did have a grandma from Korea. Her name was Eun-ji, I don’t know why Richie’s calling her Mrs. Sunny._

“Bill says you’re being weird,” Eddie reports.

Richie stands up from his straddle of the turtle statue. “ _Bill’s_ being weird,” he says sullenly, himself at ten again. He looks over at Bev. “Is it your turn?”

“Bill is being weird,” Eddie agrees, but that’s unrelated. What the fuck is a turtle ship?

Bev smiles at Richie. “I think I’m good,” she says.

Richie raises his eyebrows and tilts his head and says, “Oh, got enough riding in today already?”

Ben turns around immediately and points at Richie like his extended finger is a knife he’s suddenly drawn on him. “Watch your mouth, Richie,” he says, voice gone harsh.

But Bev puts one hand under her chin and says dreamily, “No, by all means, let’s talk about it. You start, Rich.”

Richie opens his mouth once, closes it, opens it again, and produces a stream of nonsense syllables that baffles Eddie more than perhaps any sound Richie has ever produced in his life. Then he turns, walks out of the room and into the next one (lightly defined by the wall that seems placed specifically so that Ben can display his canvas of a building under construction). The next thing Eddie hears is cabinets opening and closing.

Eddie blinks and looks at Bev, who looks extremely satisfied.

“Or we could hang out on the couch?” Ben offers.

* * *

Eddie enjoys the leather couch. It is as wide as the bed he grew up in. If he tucks his elbows in and stares up at the ceiling he remembers strongly those early days as a toddler when he thought that falling asleep was only possible if he was lying on his back. He wonders if that has to do with Sudden Infant Death Syndrome—if that was something that Sonia Kaspbrak feared when he was born, if that was documented in the 1970s, and if she tried to ingrain that on him; or if it was just his own childish misunderstandings, like his conviction that wolves were more similar to cats than dogs. He flops on his back and pries his shoes off with his toes and lets them fall to the floor.

“Tired?” Ben asks.

Eddie nods. “The body makes microadjustments to keep you upright in a moving car.” He puts both hands on his own abdomen and imagines the muscles that have to move to keep him relatively dignified at sixty miles per hour.

“Also Richie’s exhausting?” Bev suggests.

“Also Richie’s _exhausting_ ,” Eddie says cheerfully, grinning and tilting his head back to look for Richie.

Richie slumps morosely into the living room, all sullen _why can’t I ride the turtle statue_ and _guess I’ll go fuck myself, then_. He’s pouting in a way that’s a parody of sadness, which means he’s definitely trying to conceal how he’s a little bit bummed out for real. When Eddie looks up at him like a cat some of his frown softens a little and he throws Eddie a sad-eyed _call me_ handsign and drops into one of Ben’s square armchairs.

“So that thing on your counter,” he says, tone descending.

Bev’s eyes widen and she grimaces as she sits down on the couch next to Eddie. Ben looks down at the floor.

Eddie immediately suspects that _that thing_ is probably something more significant than whatever teasing Richie is naturally inclined to do. He looks around at them, looking for some other kind of facial cues.

Bev rests a hand on Eddie’s head like he’s some kind of horse that needs gentling. “We got Stan’s suicide note in the mail while he was gone.”

Eddie feels like he’s been punched. His numb right hand jerks up to shield his injuries, reflexively. “He—to Ben?”

Ben swallows and continues staring down at the floor. “Yeah,” he says.

Oh. That’s…

“But he’s fine,” Eddie says. “Right? It was just—he probably put it in the mail and then…” Then went upstairs to kill himself, and Patty didn’t realize it because she was a little busy saving her husband’s life. “He’s fine, right? Did you tell him?”

“No,” Ben says.

And then Stan came to Maine and saved Eddie’s life—which sounds impossible but so much of their lives has been impossible. Thinking about it makes Eddie start to shake a little bit, as though with cold. A world without Stan Uris.

“We can call him. Can we call him? Why don’t we call him?”

Bev checks her phone and says, “He might be having dinner right now.”

“He has had a lot of dinners in his life,” Richie points out.

So they call Stan. Bev puts him on speakerphone.

The line clicks and they hear Stan demand, “What,” as flatly as if they’d banged on his door in the middle of the night. There’s laughter in the background and Patty’s voice saying _Stanley_ with something just short of reproach.

“Sorry, is it a bad time?” Bev asks.

Stan’s voice relaxes. “Sorry, Bev, didn’t check caller ID. Uh—is it urgent?”

“Hi, Stanley!” Richie hollers.

In the wake of that, Bev says apologetically, “You might be on speaker.”

“Yeah, figured that out,” Stan replies. There’s a sigh and then he says, “I’m putting you on speaker. Patty’s here.”

“Do you have a _girl_ over?” Richie asks. “Does Stan the man have a _girl_ over?”

Stan snorts. “It’s her fucking house, dude, she put down the—sorry, baby.”

“It’s _our_ house,” says Patty. “Hello, Richie.”

The group gives a chorus of hellos for Patty.

“So Stan’s a kept man,” Richie observes.

Patty says calmly, “I’m keeping him.”

Ben covers his mouth with both hands and looks at the other three with big eyes that suggest he’s seen something so cute it’s making him feel aggressive. Ben is a romantic.

Eddie thinks anxiously about his own finances, about when’s the appropriate time to ask Ben for access to his computer so that he can get started with ordering new bank cards, and probably a checkbook. Shit, his checkbooks are back in the apartment in the city. He’s never known Myra to be spiteful about their shared finances—but, in all fairness, Myra has never known Eddie to be gay. He feels as though their marriage has just lost a lot of its safety provisions. That’s what happens when you no longer trust someone.

“So I saw you finally got to Ben’s place,” Stan says. “Bev, how are you liking it?”

Everyone looks at Bev. Eddie watches Ben school his features, which means that her response matters very, very much to him.

“It’s very nice,” Bev says. “Out in the woods. Feels very hidden.”

That’s the opposite of what Eddie felt when they approached, but he doubts Bev would sugarcoat it if she felt unsafe. He reasons that if they draw the blinds at night (please tell him that Ben draws the blinds at night), it would feel very hidden. Like shutting out the world.

Unbidden, his eyes go to Richie.

Richie is in the chair with his typical bad posture, head stooped slightly despite that he’s sitting down now. He smiles a little bit as Stan talks, but there’s no crinkling at the corners of his eyes, which seem very far away instead of here in this room with Eddie.

And Ben and Bev. Of course.

Stan is describing how his last three days have gone since they got back to Traynor and Patty went back to work. “—of Patty’s kids is having some trouble at school that the substitute wasn’t really equipped to deal with, we think.”

“But the other kids were so great about it,” Patty says. “I’m really proud of them. They were like, ‘Rebecca’s a boy!’ and kept going back to the things we talked about. Sometimes I’m really proud of kids’ absolutist thinking. You tell them something is wrong once and how to respond to it, and they remember. But we’re having his mom in later this week to discuss what happened—she’s really nice, but I’m thinking she might want to take it to the administration to discuss a unified approach for handling Rebecca’s specific case. We’ve got another kid in the class who has some extremely dangerous dairy allergies and fortunately the nurse is ready to go to bat for him when necessary, and I’m thinking that might be a good place to start.”

“And John from the office stopped by today,” Stan says. “So that was nice. He’s… a weird guy.”

“John from the office?” Richie asks.

“Yeah, John from the office,” Stan agrees.

“Oh, John from the office,” says Richie.

“Weird how?” Bev asks.

Stan is quiet for a moment, and then he says, “Okay, so you know how the laws of the world don’t make sense anymore?”

Well that's certainly one way of prefacing a conversation.

“If they ever made sense?” Ben replies, smiling slightly.

“Yes, that,” Stan says. “I’m trying not to think about it. But… some of the stuff John said. I don’t know. It sounded like he’d been there before.”

Everyone is quiet for a moment.

“Not the suicide thing,” Stan says, because none of them else is willing to speak the word into existence. “I mean—maybe the suicide thing. I don’t know. That’s not my business. But. It felt like he knew. Bev, you know how it felt?”

Eddie looks at Bev, at her lowered eyes. She’s staring down at her own knees instead of toward the phone screen, and her face has gone shuttered and sad. “Yes,” she says, her voice soft but serious.

Eddie doesn’t know if Stan’s asking because Bev, in a way, witnessed his suicide attempt, perhaps even more graphically than Patty, or because Bev was in the deadlights and lived with the consequences for years. He looks to Richie again, also recently in the deadlights, blood coming out of his nose. Richie’s smile has slid off his face and he’s staring at the phone as though it is Stan and Stan’s face.

“You know how it felt,” Stan repeats. “I mean—you all know, but.”

“Yes,” Bev agrees again.

Ben asks, “Stan?”

There’s a soft noise, as though the phone on the other end of the line is being moved, and then Patty says, “Still here.” There’s something like a determined calm to her voice.

“Patty,” Bev says, speaking up a little.

“Yes,” Patty says.

“I’m sorry. It was.” Bev swallows and looks away. “Maybe the kind of thing you don’t talk about over the phone.”

“I won’t lie, my heart’s gonna jump every time Stanley gets a phone call for maybe the rest of our lives,” Patty says. “But eventually we’ll reach the point where the pings will just go into our brain interfaces, and then I can calm down.”

There’s the sound of Stan giggling a little hysterically on the other end of the line. “I’m okay, I’m okay,” he says. “I—we should make dinner.”

“Should we let you go?” Bev asks.

“Should they let us go?” Stan repeats.

It becomes clear to whom he’s directing the question when Patty replies, “No, you can stay, we’ll make dinner with your friends. I used to do that in college, it’s fun.”

Ben says, “Oh, what do you guys want for dinner?”

Richie and Eddie look at each other. Eddie, who ate breakfast around noon and has taken an antiemetic, is slowly getting the sense that he might actually be hungry. They have no idea what Ben has in his fridge.

“We went grocery shopping this morning,” Bev says.

“I eat a lot of salad,” Ben confesses. “But Eddie, you should have something with protein. There’s flank steak in the fridge? And shrimp?” He gets up and walks across the house, presumably to the kitchen.

“I miss shrimp,” Stan says sadly.

Richie cracks up. “Did you just grow up to be a forty-year-old slut for shrimp, or what?”

“I don’t like that word, Richard,” Patty says sharply.

Richie seems to get stuck a little, his face freezing up and his shoulders stiffening. He swallows once and seems to deliberately make himself relax. “Sorry, Patty.”

Eddie feels bad watching him, but he knows that’s not a great word to use, especially in a room with women. The idea of Richie joking about Stan being a slut for shrimp is funny; if he were to joke in that same way about Bev, Eddie’s pretty sure that Ben actually would hit him, and Richie would deserve it.

“That’s okay, just don’t use it anymore,” Patty says. “We’re having salmon burgers.”

Richie’s eyes flick sideways across the room at Eddie and Bev, but whatever’s going on in his head is unreadable. Eddie feels the same discomfort he always got watching Richie get sent out of the room in school.

“Oooh, burgers,” Bev says.

“Salmon burgers?” Richie repeats skeptically.

“I need cheese on my burgers, man,” Stan says.

There is more talking. Apparently Stan usually cooks during the day while Patty works, and then they have dinner together in the evenings. Bev looks at Eddie to see if he wants to get up and follow them into the kitchen or if he’d rather hang out on the couch, and Eddie, remembering the rolling chair in the office, follows. Stan describes some of his go-to recipes—apparently he and Patty eat a lot of fish, which makes Eddie a little anxious about Stan’s mercury levels but he has to assume that Stan has that in hand.

“I can do burgers,” Ben says, staring into his fridge. “I have, like, no bread though, it's all in the freezer because I buy it and never eat it—can you do a burger on an English muffin?”

“I feel like I’m eating in college again, but like, classy,” Richie says, peering around Ben to look into the fridge. “Is that a burger patty?”

“That’s a mushroom,” Ben replies.

“That shit is _huge_ , man!” Richie says. “Bev, get a picture of that mushroom and show Stan.”

“Don’t tell me what to do, Trashmouth,” Bev says sweetly, and kisses Richie on the cheek as she goes to get a picture of the big mushroom.

“I have pita pockets?” Ben says, tilting his head. “Hang on, I know I have recipes around here somewhere.”

Eddie spins in place on the rolling desk chair, tucked as he is into the corner. After a moment his phone goes off and he checks it to see that Bev has posted a picture of the really big mushroom to the group chat.

“Shrimp burgers? Do you like shrimp burgers?” Ben asks.

“Are you just bullying me now?” Stan asks.

“Stan, isn’t that a huge mushroom?”

“That’s a pretty average-sized Portobello mushroom, Richie.”

“I don’t eat vegetables, I don’t know these things.”

Eddie makes a small despairing sound.

Ben comes over to him and shows him about twenty different burger recipes he pulled up from a website. “This one has coleslaw—do you like coleslaw?”

Eddie has no idea if he likes coleslaw or not. He’s a little intimidated by the prospect. “Ben,” he says. “Thank you for letting me stay here. Please do not make me make any decisions.”

Ben smiles at that and says, “Bev, I need a decision-maker.”

Bev crosses the kitchen—Stan is still arguing with Richie about the size of Portobello mushrooms—and leans over Ben’s shoulder. Very reasonably, Bev’s only question is, “Eddie, will you eat that?”

“I will eat that,” Eddie agrees.

“That’s what she said,” Richie says helpfully.

“Richie, I don’t care about your opinion, so I guess we’re having shrimp burgers,” Ben says. Stan laughs in the background.

Richie whistles. “Haystack got hot _and_ sassy.”

“Beep beep, Richie,” Bev says.

Eddie volunteers to be in charge of the food processer and rather aggressively pulses a bunch of raw shrimp until the gray mixture is obliterated into small enough pieces to make a patty. If anyone notices that Eddie’s taking out his jealousy on shellfish, no one comments on it. Ben serenely folds the raw shrimp—which Eddie refuses to touch—into a mixture of red pepper and Sriracha. Richie is banned from touching anything mayonnaise or mayonnaise-adjacent, because they’re all a little concerned that he might ruin this dinner for them. Bev assigns him to knife duty to stop him from taking more pictures of the inside of Ben’s fridge, and Eddie discovers that Richie can do the thing chefs do on cooking shows, where he puts the heel of his hand on the back of the knife and fires it down over the cutting board rapidly. Unlike the TV chefs, Richie’s resulting vegetables are extremely irregular in shape and size, but Eddie still starts to worry that he might start sweating just from watching.

Bev sits on top of one of the counters and supervises, phone balanced on her thigh. Ben seems happy enough with this outcome, and Eddie manages his anxiety about sitting on surfaces where food is prepared by telling himself that if Bev stays where she is, no one will use that counter anyway, so there’s no risk of contamination. No one’s chopping vegetables in Eddie’s chair, after all. She swings her feet a little as she perches there, handing Ben tasting spoons as necessary and throwing them into the sink when he’s done with them.

“You okay?” Richie asks Eddie.

Eddie blinks and becomes aware that he’s clutching his chest again. He lowers his hand and clears his throat. “Yeah, I’m fine,” he says.

He’s never cooked with anyone before. Strictly speaking he’s not really cooking now, but he at least managed the food processer, and watching all of that shrimp just get annihilated was really cathartic. He’s used to people cooking for him—it used to be his mother, with her carefully bland, carefully portioned food served to him lovingly at the table (during puberty they really had an out-and-out _Oliver Twist_ moment when he was so hungry he asked for more, but instead of throwing Eddie out of the house Sonia cried and Eddie went to bed hungry to prove that her love was enough for him); and then it was Myra wanting to cook for him to show that she cares. Eddie’s too impatient to be good at cooking, he thinks—he’s happy to slap something together, but on the rare occasions he’s home by himself to make prepackaged pasta and sauce or something he always turns the heat up too high trying to get things to cook faster, always burns things trying to cook them the maximum prescribed amount to be sure he reaches the correct internal temperature and kills the bacteria. He’s never had hot homemade food served to him without a side of guilt or the point someone else needs to prove, and he’s never enjoyed cooking to eat with other people.

Richie’s hands move almost elegantly as he sweeps scallions and sweet red peppers into a bowl. Then he frowns and pokes at some stuck to the cutting board with the tip of the knife. “Ben, gravity’s broken.”

“I’m sorry to hear that, Rich,” Ben says.

Richie’s responding giggles have a curious echoing quality and it takes them all a moment to realize that’s Patty giggling on the other end of the phone.

“Oh, you like that?” Richie says loudly, looking pleased. “You like gravity jokes? Come on, Mrs. U, I’m trying to learn my audience.”

Stan makes a noise like _chhchhchhchhchh_ on the line and Patty bursts out laughing.

“Gotta one-up me,” Richie says.

“I’m her favorite,” Stan says.

“Go wash your hands,” Patty admonishes Stan.

Richie yells, “Whoa, what are you two getting up to on the phone?”

When Patty speaks again her voice is disapproving. “Don’t be ridiculous, we would ask all of you first.”

There is silence as everyone considers the implications of that.

Then Stan bursts out laughing, so loud he crackles over the line. “Bev, take a picture of Richie’s face!”

Bev slides off the counter and tries to get a picture of Richie’s expression as Richie ducks and tries to hide from her.

“I’m holding a knife! I’m holding a knife!”

“Yeah, but you don’t know how to use it,” Eddie points out.

“Betrayal!” Richie says, spinning as he tries to dodge Bev in this tiny kitchen. “Perfidy!”

Ben covers the patties and tucks them into the fridge, looking satisfied.

* * *

When the sun goes down Ben pushes a button and the blinds slide over the windows all at the same time, so Eddie’s glad he didn’t try to pull one by hand. This does make him concerned about the level of automation in Ben’s home, though. There’s a panel on the fridge that looks electronic but he hopes doesn’t have Internet access. If this is a Smart house Eddie might lose respect for Ben as an architect and a homeowner, but he’ll still respect him as a chef.

Ben and Bev each have a beer with dinner; Richie drinks coffee because he apparently has no caffeine sensitivity. Richie seems very impressed with Ben’s locally-purchased coffee blend, which Ben reports is ethically grown and sourced from his local farmer’s market.

Eddie can imagine Ben at a farmer’s market quite easily. For some reason the idea doesn’t seem to gel with the general design of the house around them. It would have to be an upscale sort of farmer’s market, where people sell designer lemonades and very few farmers actually man their own tables.

The shrimp burgers are not bad. They say goodnight to Stan and Patty so that they can eat their dinner in peace, and then Richie and Bev quibble about the definitions of what constitutes a burger and what constitutes a patty in a pita pocket. Richie and Bev each eat two. Eddie eats his entire burger very quickly and decides that coleslaw, prepared with Ben’s reduced-calorie mayo, is acceptable.

“You’re being quiet,” Ben tells him in a lull in the conversation, which is how Eddie knows he’s _really_ being quiet.

Eddie shrugs a little. “I don’t know, man, these uneven vegetable pieces are really cutting down on my enjoyment of the meal.”

Bev snickers into her dinner.

Instead of playing mock-offended, Richie just grins. “ _Cutting_ down,” he repeats, miming a chop with the blade of his hand, and Eddie tilts his head back because he did not mean to make that pun. Richie laughs at Eddie’s exasperation.

“Just tired,” Eddie says. “Dinner was good.”

“Yeah, now sing ‘Be Our Guest,’” Richie requests.

Ben obligingly hums a few bars instead of telling Richie to fuck off, because nobody does hospitality like Ben Hanscom.

After dinner Ben grabs Eddie’s suitcases as though they’re no less convenient to wield than a couple of grocery bags—Richie openly gawks and Eddie glares at him until he puts his eyes back in his head—and leads Eddie to the guest room. Ben has gone to the trouble of folding a bath towel, a hand towel, and a washcloth and stacking them on the dresser for him. The furnishings are all dark wood and very modern, and the linens are very white. Everything smells pleasantly of lemon Pledge, which does make Eddie feel very welcome. The bedroom is hidden behind a wall, not a floor-to-ceiling window, which goes just as far into making Eddie feel better. It turns out that Ben is eccentric, but he’s not a monster.

“So the bathroom is in here,” Ben says, leading him down the hall on the tour. It’s fairly large; Eddie immediately observes that there are no overhead cabinets to hide his toothbrush from the threat of toilet plume in, but there’s a small wall shielding the toilet from the sinks, or perhaps the sinks from the toilet. Eddie can carry his new toothbrush to and from the bathroom each time he needs to brush, that’s fine. The shower is a bathtub-showerhead combo with a sleek white curtain around it; Eddie tries to discreetly check the curtain for discoloration, but this also looks fine. Eddie gets the strong suspicion that Ben has never had guests here.

He might be the first person to use this bathroom.

“And there are more clean towels in here,” Ben says, opening a little closet opposite the toilet. Then he opens the cabinet under the sink and shows Eddie the first aid kit tucked carefully away. “So if you need anything else, just let me know—or, after we leave, you can call me.” He frowns. “Or message me. I don’t know how that works for international travelling, usually I don’t need to talk to people unless I’m working with them.”

He then takes Eddie back to his room and shows him where all the electrical outlets are, shows him an outlet for a phone charger in his bedside lamp, and generally looks very anxious and solicitous and maybe a little too excited to have people here.

“Uh, Ben,” Eddie asks, wondering what’s the gentlest way to phrase this. “Am I the first person to stay in this room?”

“Yes,” Ben says. “But it’s okay, I washed the sheets today and Bev and I made the bed fresh, it’s not like a showroom.”

That’s nice to know. Eddie grabs a handful of his electric blanket and rubs the material back and forth over his palm, just for something to hang onto. He wants to ask Ben why he made multiple guest rooms in the house he’d be living in by himself, but he’s afraid to accidentally convey to him that there was no reason for him to hope for company or anything.

“Did you ever feel like you were doing things, but you didn’t really know why you were doing them?” Ben asks. Eddie thinks of Richie’s rainy-day money, which he never used in Derry but then spent all at once on a used car. “I just felt like I’d need the space one day.”

Eddie tries to imagine what it must have been like for Ben to get up every day, wander through his big glass house and know that there were empty rooms. It reminds him faintly of the period dramas that Myra likes—the scene from _Pride and Prejudice_ where the staff closes up the house and swing sheets over all the furniture. Ben mentioned that he traveled a lot for work, and Eddie wondered if that was how he treated this house, if he had people come in and close it for the season.

“Do you have other houses?”

Ben nods. “I’ve got the one out by Omaha. Internet connection’s not so great there. I’ve been remoting in to work from here, so I’ve been pretending to be professional.” He shrugs. “Like half the year I spend out there trying to brainstorm. I don’t really design so much here, I just try to let that part of me take a rest.”

Ben is giving Eddie his rest house. Eddie feels struck.

“Uh,” he says, and swallows. “I need to get on the computer and work things out with my bank. Can I do that tomorrow?”

“Sure,” Ben says. “I get up pretty early and run. I’ll have to write the password down for you, I can’t remember it unless I’m at the keyboard, but that’s no problem.”

Eddie feels a little relieved. It’s well past business hours now, but tomorrow morning should be fine. He’ll set an alarm and everything. “When do you get up to run?”

Ben tilts his head to the side. “Like seven?” he says. “I get up, run, eat breakfast, take a shower.”

“How far do you run?”

“There’s a little track kind of in a loop around the house,” Ben says. “It goes through the woods so the dried leaves can be kind of slippery certain times of the year, but I kind of wore it out, so it’s pretty safe. I just go around that.”

“Can I walk it?” Eddie asks. He’s supposed to be doing thirty minutes of light exercise every day, and he’s already missed out on a day of stretches. He’ll have to do that with his hand towel before he goes to sleep.

Ben nods. “Yeah, it’s fine if you watch where you’re going. If you want to get up I’ll walk a lap with you, just to, like, guide you.” He shifts a little in place like he’s stretching. “I haven’t been running since… Yeah. I’d probably better start slow.”

Eddie nods. He used to run back at home—not out on the sidewalk, but in their apartment building’s gym on the ground floor, usually late at night so he wouldn’t have to deal with other people being there and he could wipe down the equipment with his own disinfecting wipes without being judged. But now part of him thinks that a nice walk through nature is probably a good place to start. A good change of pace.

Ben brightens. “Oh, and I called the pharmacy, your… spirometer-thing arrived, I can run and pick it up tomorrow.”

Another knot in Eddie’s gut unwinds. “Oh good, thank you,” he says.

So. He’s all set up to recover here. It seems like everything’s in place and the only thing that remains is for him to do the work.

All right. Not bad.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bill's maternal grandmother Eun-ji is described as being from Korea, not from either North or South Korea, because her parents came to the United States before the country's division. I think Grandma Eun-ji is maybe half-Korean based on how white-passing Bill is (especially as an adult when he's played by James McAvoy), but I don't think that as children Richie and Eddie would know the difference. I chose her name specifically to reference "earth, land" because the name "George" means "farmer," which means that Georgie is named in her honor. None of this is relevant to the plot, I just thought about it. I don't actually remember very clearly what Jaeden Martell's ancestry looks like specifically, but I remember reading the Wikipedia page.
> 
> All that Stan does is tickle Patty to make her laugh, but of course Richie has to go and make it something dirty. He just didn't expect Patty to call his bluff.


	13. Somebody Out There

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Eddie takes two steps forward and one step back. Richie takes a flying leap off the deck.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey, Chapter 12 went up about an hour ago, make sure you read that one before this one.
> 
> Content warnings: Eddie gets angry about feet, but no one's here to kinkshame; implied alcoholism (Ben); Richie self-medicates with caffeine; mention of an abusive partner (Tom); Eddie has a dangerous medical event and chooses not to tell anyone about it (!); homophobia (Myra); mention of gender roles (Myra); Eddie uses a gendered insult in relation to a woman he doesn't like; discussion of harassment at work (hypothetical) and Eddie committing social gaffes in a work setting; Eddie has unrealistic expectations of recovery and some ableist thoughts directed towards himself; Richie is unkind about Eddie's relationship to medication; Eddie makes some poor choices.

Eddie wakes up when his alarm goes off in the morning and groans because he feels like he’s been hit by a truck. For a moment he reconsiders his prescribed thirty minutes of exercise, though he knows it’s still a good idea, especially because he spent most of yesterday sitting. Does he have to be as worried about blood clots after the surgery?

He gets up and creeps out into the hallway to sort of test the atmosphere of the house, see who’s awake and everything. Ben opens the door to the master bedroom, smiles when he sees him, and quietly closes the door behind him in a way that suggests he’s trying not to wake Beverly.

Eddie doesn’t know why confronting the reality of Ben and Bev sharing a bed embarrasses him, but it does. It’s not any of his business whether they’re sleeping together—he tries not even to think too hard about the statistical likelihood that they’re having sex (which is high, he will admit, though he really shouldn’t make these assumptions, considering he’s been in a sexless marriage for over three years). Maybe something about the level of scrutiny. Eddie’s still a little afraid of being looked at and known in return.

“Can you get my bandage?” Eddie whispers.

Ben nods like that’s just part of being a good host, and they go into the bathroom. Ben washes his hands and carefully removes Eddie’s bandage from his back, and Eddie thanks him and admits he doesn’t have any clothes suitable for exercise.

“I can loan you some shorts?” Ben offers.

Eddie doesn’t have compression underwear suitable for wearing under athletic shorts, but he doesn’t know if there’s a good option between _Ben wears underwear when he jogs and lets bacteria build up in them_ or _you are about to borrow an article of clothing that has touched Ben Hanscom’s dick_. So Eddie resolves to wear underwear anyway. Ben’s shorts are perfectly respectable, going down almost to his knees and cut loose enough that Eddie shouldn’t have a problem.

Eddie still can’t put on a t-shirt comfortably, but he imagines waking Richie up to borrow another button-down from him and immediately rules that out. Between the choice of making his incisions angry by trying to pull a shirt over his head, wearing the watch shirt a second day in a row to exercise in, and waking Richie up to borrow a shirt from him that he’s only going to sweat in and need another when he’s done, he decides to recycle the watch shirt. The skull shirt is still in his suitcase, but he’s worried that the drainage from his injuries might have dried into a stain and he wants to wash it himself—and bleach it himself, if necessary.

He takes a quick shower and is out in five minutes. It takes him longer to dress than it does to clean himself, and that’s because he’s mostly focused on taking care of his incisions. He’s going to have to take a second shower later, and that’s when he’ll worry about his hair and the rest of his body. He is at the moment a walking wound.

When he comes out, Ben is sitting in the living room, lacing up his shoes. He looks almost surprised to see Eddie this soon.

“How do you feel?” Ben asks.

Eddie can’t take his pain medication until he eats something, so he feels sore. But taking a shower is always the most energizing part of his day, so while he’s not exactly enjoying existence right now, he’s very aware that he’s existing. And he has vague ideas about being more mindful, just as a person.

“Hurts,” Eddie replies brightly.

Ben doesn’t seem to know what to make of that.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” he asks.

“Oh yeah,” Eddie says.

His phone is in the pocket of his hoodie, which is zipped up over the watch shirt to cover his shame. He’s ready to hit _start_ on his half-hour timer so that he can count his exercise for the day. Then he’ll eat some breakfast, do some banking, take a second shower as soon as Richie gets up and Eddie can borrow a clean shirt, and then go to the pharmacy to pick up his incentive spirometer. At some point, he’ll give up and check his email and see what Erika, his direct supervisor, has to say about his _Hi! I’m alive!_ message.

And then he’ll have to call Myra. But he doesn’t know if he wants to do that while Ben and Bev are still here. Maybe he’ll wait until they leave, and then do it one morning when Richie’s still sleeping. If he can count on himself to get up when his alarm goes off.

Ben talks while they walk, and Eddie doesn’t know why that surprises him. He’s in his own space now; it’s a relief that he feels comfortable enough to talk.

“Are there things you need or want from the store?” Ben asks. “I mean—you can come with me, we can pick up groceries if there are things you want. I can buy bread.”

Eddie blinks at him, distracted by the plod of his feet through the dirt and the crisp leaves. Part of him doesn’t want to get dirt on his new shoes that Richie bought for him—they’re nice, soft red with a funny suede-like texture and white trim, and the fact that Richie bought them makes Eddie’s insides squirm as much as the idea that, after all this time, Richie remembered his favorite color. Eddie decided that red was his favorite color when he was ten. Before that it was purple, but one of the kids on the playground told him that purple was only for girls, and Eddie went home feeling wounded but decided that red was second-best, and he could just like purple secretly.

Maybe Eddie should start wearing more purple?

Anyway, Eddie doesn’t know why Ben seems to think that he and Richie are incapable of going to the store on their own.

“Is the grocery store really far away?” he asks.

Ben shakes his head, shrugs, and sticks his hands in the pocket of his own sweatshirt. He always wore those big sweatshirts when he was a kid; with Ben dressed like that, the pair of them surrounded by trees on either side, Eddie feels like he’s in a space between time as he understands it. He can’t decide if this is good or bad for the timer in his pocket telling him when he can give up and go back to the house, but god damn it, he’s going to get his half-hour in.

“I feel a little weird about leaving,” Ben says. “I know Bev needs to leave. I know. I’ll go with her, that’s not even a question.”

Eddie nods.

“It’s a little like Bill leaving,” Ben admits.

He understands. Bill was the first of them to leave, having pressing commitments far more high-profile than the rest of them, after they defeated the great evil and won the day. Eddie remembers the clutching panic he felt in his chest at the idea that Bill might be the first of them to forget, and how sad would that be, when Bill was the nucleus of their friend group for so long? How sad and cruel.

But Bill didn’t forget, and then Stan and Patty left, and then Mike peeled off from their little group out to see the world as he deserves after all this time. Eddie can understand some anxiety about breaking their group down into smaller and smaller pieces.

Well, Eddie can understand basically any form of anxiety, but that’s neither here nor there.

“On the plus side,” he says, panting, “if we all start forgetting, you’ll have Bev. And you’ll come back, and there will be these two strange men in your house, and you’ll either remember us or call the cops on us.”

“Which will be rough,” Ben says, “seeing as you have no ID.”

Eventually Eddie decides that the path is plenty clear enough to go on his own, and lets Ben get started with his daily run. He doesn’t like the idea of holding Ben back from what he would normally be doing. Ben assures him that he’ll make a few laps, so it’s not like Eddie will be alone in the woods.

Ben does lap him at least twice before Eddie completes the circle back to the house. He yells “on your left!” each time, though he passes Eddie on the right. It’s very confusing at first, because Eddie naturally leaps to the right to get out of Ben’s way and they very nearly collide, but Ben stops and steadies him. By the time Eddie’s done his ears and nose are stinging with cold, and his hands are happy to be tucked into the pockets of his hoodie.

 _We need to sleep,_ his body tells him helpfully. _Like, now._

He doesn’t think he’s sweating too hard and, while he’s a little bit concerned about keeping his incisions clean, he’s definitely going to sweat in his sleep anyway. So instead of getting on the computer and trying to get some work done, he goes back to the guest bedroom and strips out of his exercise clothes, almost all of which are borrowed or provided by someone else, and falls asleep in his underwear under the sheets.

They are very nice sheets. As is evident from the rest of the house, Ben has expensive tastes, and Eddie can respect that. That’s the nice thing about making it out of Derry and making a name for yourself. Eddie feels like after the hell they went through, the universe owes them a few nice things.

He becomes aware of a knock at his door and sits up a little, pulling the sheet up to his chin. He’s confused, having woken from a dream where he stole a sandwich from a work meeting and had to flee his office with the sandwich while sirens blared in the background, but he couldn’t run fast enough. “Hello?” he says quietly, confused.

The door cracks open just a little bit. “I have a shirt for you,” Richie says.

Eddie becomes extremely aware of his nakedness, despite that he’s perfectly hidden in the bedding. “Okay?” he says.

This is not an invitation to come in, but Richie opens the door a little bit wider anyway, creeps in as gingerly as someone as large as him can, and places a folded button-down shirt on the dresser. Eddie remains still, as though Richie—despite having his glasses on—is one of the _Jurassic Park_ dinosaurs and can’t see him unless he moves. Richie sets the shirt down carefully and then glances at the bed, and for a moment the two of them just stare at each other.

Richie clears his throat. “Didn’t mean to wake you,” he says. “Ben said you were up, so.”

“Yeah,” Eddie says, and then becomes aware of how breathy his voice is and wants to pull the sheet up over his head to hide. He swallows. “Fell asleep.” The sheets cling to him with the ghost of his own warmth; he can feel the weight of the comforter sliding over his chest as he breathes, too gentle to irritate any of his injuries. He feels like his skin is _alive_ , like somehow Richie walking in switched on a radar and now his body’s just waiting to see what Richie’s going to do.

“I’ll let you get back to it,” Richie says, backing toward the door. He’s barefoot on the hardwood and looks curiously vulnerable. As he puts his hand on the doorknob he pauses again and then grins. “Your hair,” he says, voice warm and teasing, and then he steps out of the room and pulls the door shut behind him.

Eddie waits for the sound of Richie padding away down the hall before he turns over, presses his face into the pillow, and groans so long that his voice breaks in the middle.

* * *

When Eddie wakes up again—this time from hazy almost-hallucinations of Richie walking back into his room and climbing into the bed with him, this time in varying states of dress and undress—he finds that it’s noon. Not eleven. Noon.

This in itself is almost as distressing as the guilt he feels from the quasi-sexual dreams he suspects he willed himself into having and the eerie feeling of knowing that he should be hard but he isn’t. _And_ he needs to have breakfast, because he needs to take pain medication, because when he inhales it feels like something in his chest is resisting and trying to punish him for daring to respire.

Richie really did leave a shirt for him on the dresser—that wasn’t part of a dream. Eddie doesn’t know if that is good or bad. It’s the turtle shirt, and Eddie braces himself for more jokes about Ben’s turtle statue.

Who just has… a statue? Like, on the floor? Not on display, but perched there on the rug in the space Eddie would put a dog if he had one?

But the shirt is clean and it smells like detergent and Eddie only presses his nose to the collar and breathes in for a few seconds before he decides that a) any scent of Richie he might catch would be from his imagination and b) he doesn’t have time for this, he has to go eat so that he can take his meds. He dresses and brings his pill bottles out to the main room with him.

Richie is on the couch this time, his knees hooked over the armrest so that his shins and bare feet seem to form a barrier to anyone trying to enter the space. “Hey, Spaghetti,” he says, voice sounding oddly hoarse and creaky. His arms are folded behind his head. He’s forty and he seems to have no idea how to sit like a human being.

Eddie’s punctured, winded body tells him that the ideal thing to do would be to stand between Richie’s knees and just fall on him. Just drop directly on top of him. Crush him. See what Richie does.

“I picked up your thing,” Ben says. He’s dressed now in a sweater and for some reason has his pants rolled up to his calves. He, too, is barefoot. Eddie looks down at his own socks and wonders if the gray carpet is really that appealing. It looks shaggy in a way that should make it hard to clean. Bev is sharing an armchair with him, turned so that her back is pressed to his side. Ben looks quite comfortable despite that Bev seems to be slowly pushing him out of the chair.

“My thing?” Eddie repeats, sleep- and pain-confused.

“Your thing,” Ben repeats, and for some reason lowers his chin, holds both hands in circles under his chin, and blows down into them. If Eddie’s being generous, it looks like he’s miming playing the clarinet. If Eddie allows the little Richie voice in his brain to take over, it looks like he’s miming sucking a dick.

“My spirometer?” Eddie asks.

“Your medical bong,” Richie says. He reaches out and puts one bare foot on Eddie’s hip.

Eddie turns his head towards him so slowly and stares at him so fiercely that Richie retracts his foot and indeed hikes his knees up toward his chest entirely, bracing both feet on the arm of the couch. Eddie cannot deal with this right now.

“I need to eat,” he says, and gestures with his pill bottles. The pills inside rattle and something deep in Eddie’s brain reacts like a dog faced with a can full of pennies, wanting to shrink away from it. “Now, ideally.”

Ben stands up immediately and says, “I got it. Can you do fruit?”

“I can do fruit,” Eddie agrees. He’s grateful for the rapid suggestion instead of last night’s humming and hawing over dinner.

Ben walks across the house toward the kitchen and Bev, without looking up from her phone, slides backward to take full occupancy of the chair. Richie, still in his extravagant position on the couch, seems to scowl as Ben goes by.

“Move over,” Eddie tells him.

Richie immediately braces both feet on the armrest and pushes himself back along the couch to make room for Eddie to sit. Eddie stiffly rounds the corner and sits. Richie’s feet hover in the air and his scowl has shifted into a guilty doubtful look.

“Oh my god, put your feet on my lap, I don’t fucking care,” Eddie says, maybe a little more aggressively than the situation warrants.

Bev looks up for that, which makes Eddie feel self-conscious. Richie settles his feet almost meekly in Eddie’s lap.

“You can move them when I start eating,” Eddie says.

Richie’s feet are very pale and marked with sparse, straight dark hair across the tops and down to a point. The big toe has a faint showing, and the rest of his toes are so bare in comparison that they seem fish-belly white. His second toe is longer than his biggest one, but it’s not very noticeable because of how they gently curl. Eddie looks at them dispassionately, surprised by his indifference, his lack of revulsion. People’s feet are objectively disgusting. They’re in socks all day, just collecting bacteria. Or they’re in sandals, wearing down and collecting calluses.

Richie’s feet are not gross. They’re not hot—and Eddie feels a weird sense of relief at that, the idea that he’s allowed to look at Richie’s _feet_ without feeling uncontrollable lust—but they’re not gross. They should be gross. Why the fuck aren’t they gross? Why can’t Richie just have some fucking gross feet like the rest of them?

So maybe Eddie’s a little quietly angry about that, and then he figures out that Richie’s feet aren’t hot but his ankles definitely are. Apparently Eddie’s into bony ankles. Secretly he’s been a Victorian this whole time. There’s a bare hollow under the outside of Richie’s ankle that Eddie wants to touch to see if it’s as soft as it looks, but he’s not going to do that.

Ben brings him a collection of fruit salad in a Tupperware and, despite it being a very nice selection, Eddie eats it like a hyena on a carcass, crushing grapes in his teeth like they’re bones.

* * *

It’s suspicious, how easily the bank stuff goes. He gets on the website with his usual username and password, clicking _No_ when the site asks him if he wants it to remember this device, and then the matter of marking his previous cards _Lost or Stolen_ is simple. The issue is that it wants to send the replacement cards to his old address, to the apartment he shares with Myra. When he tries to indicate that this is not the address he wants them to go to, the site directs him to get on the phone with customer service.

Swearing the whole time, Eddie goes in and dials the number on his new prepaid cellphone. While he’s on the line, listening to the smooth jazz (which always ratchets up his temper more than any other genre of music, just from this association with customer service) and the frequent interruptions to remind him of other products that his bank would like to make available to him, Bev creeps into the room and perches on one of the countertops. Then, of course, this phone number is not a number that they have on file with his account, so he has to enter in his date of birth and the last four digits of his social and wait a while longer.

Bev sits on the counter and swings her bare feet. Her toenails are painted very dark blue. Myra favors lighter, more neutral shades, though she has trouble resisting glitter. When the polish starts to chip the glitter tries to peel off her toes with the rest of it and sometimes just becomes very sharp. Eddie remembers lying in bed with her at night, her half asleep and accidentally scratching him with the glitter in her nail polish.

Is it Eddie who has the issue going around with bare feet? Is this a thing that everyone else is accustomed to and it’s just him who has the issue? He wheels around from the computer, phone still pressed to his ear, and turns his back to Bev, the canvas with the crane, and the four plants slowly rehydrating in the sink. Instead he stares at the golden turtle.

The customer service representative comes on the line and asks him how they can help him today.

Eddie takes a deep breath. “Okay, so what I need is replacement credit and debit cards sent to an address not on my file.”

There’s a pause. “Okay,” says the representative.

“Because I’m filing for divorce from my wife, and I don’t want her to have my new address, but I’ve recently lost my wallet and phone and I’m trying to replace these essentials.”

Eddie is aware of how sketchy this sounds. Honestly, if his bank allows him to do this without giving him too hard a time, he’s going to judge them a little bit. Just because it reflects on their security. Eddie’s story is true, and surely there must be other customers in similar positions _without_ the interference of a demon clown from outer space, but if he gets through this whole process with what he wants, he will feel proportionally less safe about leaving his money with them.

It does not surprise him when the representative has to consult their supervisor.

* * *

Over an hour later, Eddie and his bank have come to the following agreement: that he will provide them with a copy of his identification as soon as he can (he knows there’s a scanned image of his passport somewhere in his email inbox, from various arguments he had with HR, and he can send that over) and that they will provide him with a new debit card as soon as they receive that. They will send it to Ben’s address, which is fortunately still in the state of New York and at least makes it marginally less complex. They will allow him to open up his own account in his own name, which Myra will not have access to, but they will not allow him to transfer more than two thousand dollars per day from of his shared account with her until they are directed to by an order from family or divorce court. They will freeze his credit cards, but they will not issue him new ones until the cards are paid off. And—and this is important—they will add his new phone number to his user account, and it will not be visible to Myra.

All in all, while Eddie’s somewhat disappointed that everything isn’t being done exactly the way he wants exactly the moment he asks for it, it’s pretty reasonable. Bev is messing with something on her phone but still watching him; he can see her smile a little out of the corner of his eye when he says something too overtly exasperated. He has no idea where Ben and Richie are, or how he lost them in this big glass house. And he was made to provide all of the code words and security phrases that he agreed with the bank when he became a member, so he could feel _less_ secure.

When he hangs up he sets his phone down on the desk and looks at Bev.

Bev laughs.

Eddie makes a disconsolate exhausted noise.

“Is that it?” she asks.

“No, I have to fix my driver’s license,” he says. He goes to the website, looks at the requirements and finds that he’s allowed to have his replacement driver’s license sent to a temporary address, and then looks around. “Do you think Ben has a printer in this place?”

Ben has a printer. He comes up from the lower level of the house with the printer in his hands and goes about plugging it in, connecting it to the internet, and downloading the software necessary to make it work. Eddie is a little bit horrified not just by this Smart printer with internet access, but also that Ben doesn’t keep it in the place where it would be most convenient for him to use it.

Then they discover that Ben does not have paper.

Ben closes his eyes and says, “I’m so sorry.”

Eddie, already flustered from the time on the phone with his bank and the frustrations of navigating a DMV website, bites his tongue to stop from asking Ben why the fuck he has a printer but no paper.

“I will go get you some paper,” Ben says solemnly. “I’m just… gonna have to wait a bit.”

Not understanding, Eddie blinks at him.

“I can drive,” Bev says.

Eddie glances from her to Ben and back, still confused, before he realizes that Ben has been drinking. Which answers the question of where Richie is.

“I mean—it’s no problem,” Eddie says. “It’s gonna take ten days for it to get here anyway, and I’m going to have to put the thing in the mail.”

“Right, yes, the mail,” Ben says. “I can show you where the mailbox is.”

Eddie looks out the window and down the long drive leading toward the main road. “I’m gonna have to wait a bit for that too,” he confesses, because his thighs are sore.

“That’s fine,” Ben says. “Sorry, I should have asked if we were going anywhere else today.”

But it’s not like Ben can be expected to anticipate Eddie suddenly needing a printer. Eddie’s just happy that he has one.

“Can I borrow eighteen dollars to replace my driver’s license?” he asks. “I’ll pay you back.”

“Of course you can,” Ben says easily.

* * *

Later, when Ben has sobered up a little and insisted on going to get printer paper at two PM on a Wednesday, Richie comes up from downstairs. He is still, inexplicably, drinking coffee, despite the time of day. Eddie is somewhat horrified for his teeth, though they don’t look particularly stained.

“Is it that good?” Bev asks, somewhat amused.

Standing at the top of the stairs, Richie looks nonplussed, until Bev jerks her head pointedly and he looks down into the coffee cup. “Oh!” he says. Eddie wonders if there’s some kind of liquor in there and feels absurdly jealous that everyone can drink but he can’t. “I mean, it’s not bad.” He throws himself down onto the couch and bounces Eddie in the process, like they’re sharing a trampoline; Eddie seizes the edge of the couch to hold himself steady. “So Bev.”

“So Richie,” she replies.

“Does Ben have a past as a bartender, or…?”

“Ben drinks,” Bev says calmly.

It takes a moment for that to settle in and then Eddie immediately feels like a heel for being mad about his medical bans.

Richie just nods. “With you?” he asks.

“I haven’t seen him binge except for that first night,” she replies. “We talked about it.” She says that like she’s closing the book on the subject.

“Okay,” Richie says, and looks at Eddie. Eddie is staring at his fingers where they’re holding the mug, how large his knuckles look. He can only fit two of them through the handle. He holds the mug out to Eddie. “Do you want?” he asks.

Eddie looks up at him, startled. In general, the answer to the question _does Eddie want_ has recently been proven to be a resounding _yes_. He is indifferent to this coffee. “Is there booze in it?”

“There is no booze in it,” Richie says. “It is cold, though. I can microwave it.”

Eddie pulls a face and Richie grins and takes a sip, apparently unbothered.

“I think we’re going to buy tickets,” Bev says quietly. She’s not looking at them; she’s sitting sideways in the armchair again, her head turned toward the massive window.

All the furniture in here really ought to be sunbleached. If Eddie cared a little more he would look at the back of the couch to see if the leather is a truer black where it’s hidden against the wall.

“To where?” Eddie asks, instead of busying himself with creeping on Ben’s furniture.

He knows this isn’t a fun getaway, knows that Bev has to be anxious about being in any one place, but deep down he always wanted to travel. Not to see the sights or to become more cultured, but just to go. Not even to say he had gone, but just to feel it. He heard once that you can get anywhere in the world within seventy-two hours, and the part of him that took three attempts before he finally moved out of his mother’s place always wanted to believe it.

“Oh,” Bev says quietly. “Just—anywhere, I think.”

“Pick the cheapest tickets?” Richie asks. He puts his feet up on the table. Eddie glances down at his ankles where they’re exposed from his jeans and then away again.

Bev smiles. “Maybe.”

Eddie has a strong suspicion about why they haven’t bought tickets already, and it has to do with him. He feels grave and a little guilty and says nothing.

“The nice thing about having all my memories back,” Bev says, her face suddenly brightening, “is that at least I know I have friends that he doesn’t know about.” She grins like it’s funny, like she might start laughing. There is genuine joy on her face.

“Ancient child-eating alien magic: good for hiding contingency plans _from yourself_ ,” Richie says, in what is definitely a Voice, though Eddie doesn’t recognize it. He picks his left hand up and ruffles at his hair, making it stand up wildly in the front. _“Aliens.”_

Bev laughs, so she gets the reference. Eddie feels once again out of the loop, but while he would normally demand Richie’s coffee or shove his feet in his lap or something else to get his attention, in this moment he already feels uncomfortable with the level of scrutiny on him.

“I don’t want you to put things off because of me,” Eddie tells her.

Her eyes flick to him and her face softens. “Honey, that’s not it. We only got here yesterday.” She crosses her legs. “To tell the truth, I think Ben’s excited about having guests.”

“You think?” Richie asks.

“We went grocery shopping,” she says. “It was… really nice. You guys won’t have to restock for a while.”

Eddie imagines himself and Richie at the grocery store, except for some reason they’re teenagers and Richie is trying to climb in the cart. Is that a thing that happened? It feels like it might have been a thing that happened. He looks at Richie, trying to see if he shares this train of thought, but Richie’s frowning in Bev’s direction. Not like he’s displeased by her, but almost like he’s looking through her, maybe out the window.

“He bought beets,” Bev adds.

Richie’s face collapses and suddenly he’s back in the room with them. “Aw, man, I don’t know what to do with beets,” he says. “What am I supposed to do with all these goddamn vegetables?”

“Do you have scurvy?” Eddie asks.

“I do not have scurvy,” Richie says.

“Because if you don’t eat vegetables, you will get scurvy.”

Richie holds his coffee cup off to the side and shimmies his shoulders like a go-go dancer. “No, but I can shiver your timbers if you let me walk your—” His pirate Voice is not good. It just sounds Scottish. And he can’t even get all the way to the end of his joke before he collapses laughing, just watching Eddie’s face.

“Bev, I’ve changed my mind,” Eddie says loudly, over Richie’s hysteria. “If you go, one of us will kill the other, and I don’t know which.” He might have the disadvantage of injury, but he’s pretty sure that if he just says something completely bananas it’ll incapacitate Richie for long enough that Eddie could finish him off.

Not like that.

Maybe like that.

God, Eddie has to call his wife soon.

“That’s a risk I’m willing to take,” Bev says, because she’s stone-cold, but she smiles a little as she says it.

* * *

They make dinner again that night, as a group, and then while Richie is on another round of mocking the giant golden turtle statue—named Goldie, now, “to go with Silver”—Ben and Bev buy plane tickets online. They discuss their destination in murmurs. Eddie is sure they would tell them where they’re going if they were to ask, but if Bev feels safer not telling, he’s fine with that. He takes Ben’s smaller houseplants out of the sink one by one and replaces them around the house where they’ll get adequate light.

“Not the spider plant,” Ben says, looking up. “That one needs indirect light.”

Eddie considers this and then quietly steals it and puts it on the dresser in the guest room.

* * *

The morning that Ben and Bev leave for what Richie is calling “Location Redacted,” Eddie faints in the shower.

His half an hour of exercise is fine. His stretches aren’t _comfortable_ —there are positions in which he’s never been able to link his hands behind his back, and up until now he’s been okay with that—but he’s doing them. The incentive spirometer is not ordered from Amazon, which makes Eddie feel better about using it; and while he definitely plateaued a bit in his progress since he left the hospital, he has every intention of working back up to it. His debit card is on its way, he printed out the DMV forms and his utility bills for proof of identity to get his replacement driver’s license mailed to a temporary address, and Bev has provided him with a list of New York divorce lawyers that her own New York divorce lawyer recommended.

It strikes him as deeply unfair that they should both have been living in this city all this time, and never run across each other. It’s not that Eddie really hangs out with big-name fashion designers every day, but it just seems unfair that they were made to forget each other and they were _right there_ all this time. It’s a big city, but it’s not _that_ big a city. Eddie runs into Myra’s friends on a regular basis.

So he feels that he’s making a good start on his recovery, and that if he has two and a half weeks to go, he ought to be increasing exponentially every day. He can call his doctor’s office and ask for recommendations in this area, and maybe see about getting started on his formalized physical therapy out here.

He gets up in the morning, showers, puts his DMV application in the mail, and then watches Ben literally run circles around him for half an hour. Ben is nice about it. Eddie manages two and a quarter laps around the whole house and when his little alarm goes off he turns around and walks the quarter lap back to the house instead of completing a full two laps. But that’s about two and a half laps in total, and that’s not bad. He pants as he walks back and has to take a seat on the steps up to the deck before he can make it back into the house, but then he manages both little sets of stairs in one agonized shot.

He makes it to the kitchen—why the fuck is Ben’s kitchen so far away from the other spaces in which _living_ is done? He has almost all the rooms lined up like cars on a train, so why not shove the office on the very end as the caboose?—and gulps down cold water, disregarding Sarah’s command for _little sips_ in favor of trying to physically cool the burning in his chest and throat. He eats more fruit—Ben has so much goddamn fruit, it’s going to be impossible for Richie to get scurvy here—and then he goes to take his second shower of the day. He’s a grown man of forty and he can’t be sleeping in until noon every day.

Ben’s shower is acceptable. The bathtub is clean and it even has a rubber safety mat in the bottom, despite it clashing horribly with the sleek square apparatuses in the room. Even the toilet is not quite ovular in shape, though it is at least a reassuring clean white, devoid of dust.

Eddie wonders if Ben has a cleaning service that came in while he was gone or whether he did a full clean of his house in anticipation of Richie and Eddie arriving. Based on the condition of the plants, he suspects that the latter is more likely. Eddie feels a little guilty about that but he is very much enjoying the results.

The hot water is very good, too, coming on almost instantly and without any strange sulfuric smells like you get in some rural areas. The shampoo and soap suds up easily, which means that the water softness is good too. He lets the water drill on his skull until he feels some of the lingering tension in his jaw and spine relax.

He doesn’t know how long he’s in there, but it can’t be very long. Still, it takes him longer than it should for him to realize that that’s not just steam fogging up his vision. Right around the time that the little sparks appear, his optic nerve demanding his attention, he realizes that he doesn’t have to be worried about the ventilation and moisture level in Ben’s guest bathroom; he’s passing out.

“Fuck,” he whispers, and lowers himself to lie on the rubber safety mat in the tub. He gets his head down and his legs and arms in the recovery pose and just lies there for a bit. The water isn’t directly hitting him in the skull now, and it’s marginally cooler down here. He turns his head a little bit, then reaches out a foot and hits the little mechanism that changes from shower to bath with his heel. The tenor of the running water changes. Eddie breathes.

There’s still conditioner in his hair. He managed to wash his incisions—he’s still doing a better job on the front one than on the back, but that’s a hazard of not being able to see behind him—with the unscented soap that the doctor recommended, and now he’s careful not to let either his chest or back touch the sides of the tub.

Okay. Breathe. This is fine.

Slowly he, on hands and knees, creeps around in the bathtub like something out of a horror movie and holds the top of his head under the faucet. The conditioner gets kind of blasted out of his hair. It’s very efficient. Eddie closes his eyes and breathes through his open mouth and thinks thoughts about how little water is required to drown someone, and then shuts the water off entirely.

Then he continues to lay in the tub. It’s not porcelain, he reflects, looking at one of the sleek grooves carved on the inside to give it a random hydrodynamic shape. It’s plastic, but it’s meant to look like porcelain. The drain burbles and, while he never had any trouble with voices in the pipes (he never needed a monster when he was already in his mother’s house), he thinks of Bev’s bloody bathroom.

There’s a little row of tiny complimentary toiletries lined up on one corner of the bath. Richie stole them out of the hotel.

He tries to assess whether he’s had enough to eat this morning—yes, he filled his stomach, and while fruit might not be the protein that his doctor recommended, it does hold him over for hours. Something about the long breakdown of it releasing energy over a period of time. Maybe he should have waited until he was a little further in the digestion process before he tried to take a shower—but he just wanted to stop himself from falling back asleep, and he wanted to get cleaned up before he had to face Richie and Bev.

 _Mostly Richie_ , he tells himself sternly. He doesn’t necessarily care whether Bev sees him sweaty and falling apart from trying to take a simple walk outside. To be fair, he shouldn’t care whether Richie sees him gross after exercising, because Richie literally carried him out of a sewer, but it’s the principle of the thing.

Stupid. So stupid.

He has to have drunk enough water—he’s so hydrated, he’s deathly afraid that the heavy medications that knock him out in the middle of the night will make him piss himself in his sleep, especially since he’s still taking medicine for the goddamn UTI—and he definitely turned the shower up too hot. Eddie exists in a perpetual state of dry skin despite Myra’s pushing enough Gold Bond lotion to do advertisements for it, because he would bathe in lava if given the opportunity. Maybe he stood under the water for too long, and if he’d been in and out within five minutes he wouldn’t even have noticed.

Probably just overexerted himself. He doubts he’d have this problem if he had taken the hot thorough shower _before_ exhausting himself pacing around Ben’s house. He feels okay now, lying here at the bottom of the bathtub—he can see this white plastic bathtub perfectly fine, can read the lettering on the stolen complimentary toiletries perfectly fine, and this shower curtain is nice and clean.

Okay.

Okay.

He’s not ready to run any marathons here, he’ll admit that much. He should drink some more water and go lie down on a surface intended for such things—probably go back to bed, actually. Naps for medical reasons are very different from just going back to bed until noon with reckless abandon.

But he’s a little afraid to get up. Falling in the bathroom is so much worse than just getting lightheaded in the shower. His brain is full of the _Call! Don’t Fall!_ pamphlets from the hospital, and very aware of how naked and vulnerable he is.

And pushing himself up on this wet surface is going to suck, despite the rubber safety mat. He can already tell that his arms are not going to thank him for it.

He reaches up and turns the dial of the faucet to _cold_ , then opens the spigot up just a little. A narrow ribbon of cold water streams out and he holds his face under it, feeling like the protagonist in a movie about a man trying to survive in the wild. He’s not ready to drink unfiltered water straight from the tap, but splashing some cold water on his face is just a good move in general.

Then he shuts the water off, gets up on his knees, and crawls out of the bathtub. There’s a plain bathmat on the floor in front of him, and he’s glad for it, not wanting to see the way he would slip on the tile without it. He braces himself carefully on the side of the bathtub and levers his legs out one at a time, and then his upper body. The closer he is to the floor, the better he feels about his odds.

This is fine, he tells himself as he crawls around the bathroom, gladder of its cleanliness than he ever has been about any bathroom in maybe his entire life. This could have been so much worse. He could have fallen in the shower and bashed his head in _and_ been naked when whoever heard the crash came to find him. If they heard the crash. Otherwise he could have just lain there with the hot water going cold over him until someone came in to figure out why he was taking so long in the shower and not responding to their knocks and calls. Maybe he would have broken his neck on the way down. Maybe he would have survived Pennywise, only to die because he slipped in the shower.

 _Fuck_.

He feels furious. He uses that to drag the towel down from the hook, wrap it around himself, and lever himself cautiously up using the counter to support his weight.

And he still hasn’t accomplished any of the things that he wanted to do.

It’s fine. Ben suggested that he move into the master bedroom when he and Bev go, and the shower in there has a bench. He assumes it’s a walk-in, not that Ben’s architectural weirdnesses just extend to installing random benches in bathtubs.

 _Sex bench_ , the voice in his head that sounds like Richie volunteers helpfully.

 _What if you did faint, Eddie?_ says the alien voice that sounds like himself but not. _What if you did faint, and you died in the shower, and after all of these things you did to try to get your life better, you never even got started?_

So Eddie goes back to his guest room, wrapped in a towel. He finishes off his water bottle, he sits on the bed, he checks the clock to see how likely it is that Bev and Richie are up and can hear him.

And he calls Myra.

* * *

More accurately, he texts Myra. He knows that she won’t pick up for a strange number, especially since he told her that he wants a divorce and for all he knows she might be trying to dodge any lawyers he sends after her. He writes, _Myra, it’s Eddie_ and sends it, and then waits.

The phone rings almost immediately. That’s good—Eddie was a little worried that she would have the opening shift at work and not see his message for a while, and Eddie would wait hours for her to get back to him, and then by the time she did he would have lost his feeling of having built a defense out of frustration and self-pity and _no more_. He picks up.

“Oh my god, Eddie?” she asks. “Are you okay?”

“I’m okay,” he replies.

“Do you need help? Do you need me to come get you?”

He takes a deep breath, feeling the little stab of pain from his ribs, and says, “No,” in a tone that means that nothing’s changed since the last time they talked.

He can tell she gets it, because she’s silent for a long moment. Then she says, “What the fuck are you doing, Eddie?”

Myra doesn’t curse often—has a certain idea about what is ladylike and what is not, but has moved beyond that in the past when she’s really frustrated with her mother or her sister’s family. But he doesn’t think he’s ever heard her drop an f-bomb before. Certainly not directed at him.

“I don’t hear from you for—for _ages_ , after you just _run out of the house_ and you won’t tell me where you’re going, and then you drop something like that on me out of the blue—do you know how worried I was about you? I thought you were dead. I didn’t know what happened to you.” Her voice is low and venomous. Eddie opens his mouth to interrupt but she pushes on. “And then you’re in the hospital, which is exactly what I was afraid of—”

No, she just said she was afraid of him being dead, he thinks with something like amusement but too bitter.

“—and you won’t tell me what the _fuck_ is going on, and you won’t give me a number to call you, and say you want a _divorce_? If anyone should ask for a divorce it should be me, considering you _abandoned_ me.”

Eddie has looked at a lot of _how to file for divorce in New York_ articles today, and he says, “We have to be living apart for a year before you can file for divorce on grounds of abandonment.”

Myra is silent.

“Then again, we haven’t had sex in three years, so you could file for constructive abandonment,” he adds. “I wouldn’t contest that.” Obviously.

Myra explodes.

“Is this about _sex_?” she demands. “Are you—are you trying to prove some kind of point because we haven’t had _sex_? Because you could have said something _before_ whatever the fuck this is—”

Actually, he’s oddly proud of her for cursing him out. It’s preferable to her tears. Eddie will always take her anger over tears.

“—before running away like a teenage girl who didn’t get her way, goddamn it, Eddie, if I felt like you wanted me this wouldn’t be a problem—”

Oooh, that one hit. Eddie grits his teeth.

“Myra, I told you I’m gay,” he says. “We shouldn’t be married because I’m gay.”

Actually, they shouldn’t be married for a lot of reasons, but that’s probably the biggest one.

“You’re not gay!” Myra shouts back. “That’s a cop-out, Eddie, you just don’t want to do the work of a real relationship, you never have, you never put in your weight in therapy, you—”

“Myra.”

“—and now you’re forty and you’re just—just like that guy in your office who—”

“Myra.”

“—I’ve seen the posts he’s made with that woman on a _motorcycle_ of all things, like he doesn’t have two children who have to—”

“Myra,” Eddie says. “I should not have proposed to you, because it wasn’t fair.”

The long silence is what he always imagined would happened if he ever hit her. Not that he ever hit his wife—not that he would ever hit his wife—but sometimes when they were fighting and her tears were rolling he would think, _God, you’re really hurting her, you’re just as bad if you raised your hands to her_ , comparing this Myra to a Myra in another world who staggered back from him, stunned.

“ _Fair?”_ she says. “You want to talk about what’s _fair_? Okay, let’s talk about that—because _you_ are the one trying to make the unilateral decision to end our marriage, and I don’t think _that’s_ fair. Marriage is hard, Eddie, it isn’t easy, everyone who stays in a marriage long term says that it’s a choice, that you have to do the work, and I’ve been trying to do the work, Eddie, but I can’t carry this for both of us.”

“I’m not asking you to,” Eddie says. “I’m asking you to stop.”

He hears how tight her voice is coming out and knows she’s going to start crying. He tries to steel himself for it in the silence between his words and her response.

“I don’t want to stop,” she says, her voice breaking. “I don’t want to stop, I don’t want to, please, I love you, you married me, we said that we’d be together for the rest of our lives, please, Eddie, this isn’t fair.”

Fuck.

“And that’s my fault,” Eddie says. It’s not sarcastic, not the way she was spitting at him just moments ago—because it is his fault, he could have put a stop to this years ago, put a stop to it before it even started, he just wasn’t ready to face it. “But Myra, I don’t think we were happy.”

“Why don’t you love me anymore?”

He closes his eyes. This is hard to say. It’s probably the cruelest he’s ever been to a person. “Myra, I _can’t_ love you that way. It’s not your fault. I just can’t.”

She sobs once. “You said you did. You said.”

“I didn’t know,” Eddie says, because he genuinely didn’t. He might have told himself strictly where his eyes were and were not allowed to go, but there was a time when he genuinely thought that this was what love was, for him. It never got beyond a superficial level; it was allowing someone to take from him the things they needed, it was having a partner in the world and moving through it together and making compromises and putting aside the things about her that annoyed him because there were surely things about him that annoyed her, and that was just what marriage was.

It’s not what he wants. It’s not this all-consuming thing that seems to cut to the quick of him, makes him stupid, makes him put rationality aside.

“I’m sorry,” he says.

There’s a silence on the other side of the phone and then hitching breaths. “Did you—did you—did you cheat on me? Is there someone else? Is that why you ran out?”

He swallows. “I have never cheated on you,” he says, his voice stronger. “I have been faithful to you for our entire marriage, Myra, I swear.”

He hears her crying—that gasping out of control hee-hawing breathing from when she’s really down. “I don’t—I don’t believe you,” she says, her voice a little harder in turn.

“I don’t blame you,” he says. “It’s true. You can go get tested if you want, you’re the only person I’ve ever slept with.”

“Then how can you be _gay_?” she wails. “How can you know, if you’ve never slept with a man?”

This irritates him. “I don’t know, Myra, how could you commit to marry a man despite being a virgin?” he snaps back.

She gasps on the other end of the phone and then comes back with her previous vehemence. “Don’t you _dare_ throw that in my face like it’s a bad thing, don’t you _dare_.”

He knows she’s sensitive about how old she was when they finally got married. Her mother—admittedly, Judith is kind of a bitch, though Eddie would never say that out loud—went so far as to call her a spinster to her face, though she was only thirty-two when Eddie finally gave in and proposed despite his better judgment. But she was proud of having waited—said lots of things, deeply satisfied, to her sister about being glad she waited for the right man, about being glad she finally found him, and now…

“Please don’t do this to me,” she says. “Please don’t do this to me—Eddie, I’m _forty_ , I’m old, I make minimum wage, I don’t even own my own car—what am I supposed to do? I need—” Another gasping breath. “—I need your insurance, I need you to keep the apartment, I need you, and you need me too, you need me to—to cook for you, and to keep things clean the way you like them, and to keep you calm, and—Eddie, please, you don’t have to love me, but you’re my best friend. You’ve been my best friend for so long, you can’t do this to me.”

“I have to do this,” Eddie says. “It’s not fair to you.”

“No, _you’re_ not being fair to me!” Myra shouts. “Don’t act like you’re doing me a favor here—you—you have a good job and money and you’re in the prime of your life, and you’re hanging me out to dry—if you leave me, no one’s ever going to love me, Eddie.”

“They will,” Eddie says. He swallows. “You might not believe me now, but there’s somebody out there for you, Myra.”

“There isn’t! You think I don’t know all of those stupid platitudes? I waited _so long_ , Eddie. I waited _so long_ , and you can’t—you can’t—”

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m sorry I did this to you. But we have to stop, Myra. We’ll be better off without each other, I’m sorry, I have to do this.” And he ends the call.

She tries to call him back twice while he’s blocking her number, and then he does it and he sets the phone down on the bed beside him and covers his eyes.

* * *

There’s a knock on his door. Eddie wakes up and realizes that he’s still wearing a towel. “Don’t come in!” he says quickly.

“Are you jerking off?” Richie asks.

Eddie rolls his eyes. “I’m naked, hang on.” He rolls off the bed and goes to the dresser to start digging out clothes.

There’s a soft sound of someone leaning against the door. “Tell me more,” Richie says, voice teasing.

Eddie looks up and finds his face in the mirror. Instead of flushed from Richie’s joking, he looks deathly pale. He returns his attention to opening his drawers. “Sorry, I’m sneaking your sis—brother out the window right now.”

Richie laughs. “God, I hope not, we’re on the second story.”

Eddie steps into his boxers, loses his balance, and catches himself on the dresser. The spider plant is judging him. “It’s a split level.”

“So we’re on the one-and-a-halfth floor.”

“That’s not a thing,” Eddie says. “How did you pass math?”

“With flying colors, baby,” Richie says.

“Uh-huh. What’s thirteen squared?”

There’s silence for a moment.

“You better not be looking that up on your phone,” Eddie adds as he wrestles his way into one of Richie’s shirts.

Another thud against the door. “Come on, the teachers always said we’d never walk around with a calculator in our pockets, and we _do_ , it’s our job to use it, to stick it to them!”

“Can’t, too busy sticking it to your dad,” Eddie replies. He gets his pants up over his hips, buttons and zips them shut, and tugs to open the door.

Richie stumbles backwards into the room, catching himself on the doorframe. He straightens himself up, looking at Eddie like _you didn’t see that_. “You could not _handle_ Went,” he says.

“This conversation has taken a weird turn,” Eddie says. “And it’s all your fault, I’d just like that on the record.”

“You made it weird.”

“ _You_ made it weird!”

Richie’s blocking his way out of the room. Eddie doesn’t know what to do with this—he’s not gonna shove past him, not with his ribs and shoulders feeling as horrible as they do. He stares at him for a long moment, waiting for Richie to explain why he woke him up. Richie gives him a once-over, his gaze lingering on Eddie’s thighs where his own oversize shirt hangs down. Probably getting ready to say something smug about Eddie’s height.

“Did you need something?” Eddie prompts him.

He looks back up. “Ben and Bev want to leave for the airport. I told them that I’d wake you up if you weren’t already up and moving. Because they were scared of walking in on you _naked_.”

The way he says it is lascivious, stretching it out like it’s a toy to play with. Eddie knows that he should be reacting some way right now—either blushing or getting turned on or whatever—but instead he just raises an eyebrow at Richie.

“I can be naked if I want,” he says.

Richie sleeps in boxers, Eddie really doesn’t feel he has room to talk. In fact, Richie owes Eddie financial compensation for emotional damages brought on by seeing Richie in boxers.

Richie takes a step back out of the room, his hands going up to rest on top of the doorframe. Eddie remembers him doing that when they were in high school—celebrating his growth spurt by leaping up and slapping the top of the door. He was definitely making fun of how short Eddie was then. Now—Eddie doesn’t know what he’s doing. He looks curiously on display there, hanging with his arms up like that. Eddie keeps his eyes rigidly on Richie’s face.

His expression suggests he’s completely at ease. “Good for you, Eds,” he says. “Quit your job. Join a nudist colony. Live the unexamined life.” He takes another step back and actually lets Eddie out of his room.

“Speaking of my job,” Eddie says. “I got an email from my boss.”

“Yeah?”

“And she asked for a doctor’s note.”

Richie throws his head back and starts laughing so hard that he slumps into the wall. Eddie ignores him and keeps going, walking toward the common areas to find Ben and Bev.

Bev is standing on the stairs. She’s wearing no makeup, so her eyes look extremely large and heavy-lidded; Eddie thinks immediately of dragons and then cannot understand why. When they come around the corner, making their usual ruckus, she looks up. “Huh?”

“Eddie’s nine years old and has to bring a doctor’s note to the principal’s office!” Richie cackles.

“My boss,” Eddie explains shortly. He looks out the massive window to see Ben coming up the deck. He’s not just the only uncultured one here, he’s also the only one who’s not self-employed. “I may have imagined, for a moment, sending her a shirtless picture and asking if that counted.”

Richie slides down the wall.

“Then you would have a different problem,” Bev says, her tone far more reasonable than her words. “You might as well try it. You got impaled; you should be allowed to play the _I got impaled_ card.”

“Oh my god,” Richie gasps from the floor. “Oh my god, do it, see if you can get out of work because your boss is like _oh, Edward Kaspbrak hits the gym_.”

“Of course I’m not going to do that,” Eddie says as Ben opens the front door.

He smiles as soon as he sees Eddie. “Hey, you’re up.” Then he looks at Richie, who appears to be experiencing his death throes. “What aren’t you doing?”

“Sending his boss topless pictures,” Bev explains succinctly.

Weirdly, it’s Ben who blushes over that. “Oh,” he says. “I think that would be harassment.”

“Yes, I know it would be harassment,” Eddie confirms. “HR doesn’t like me anyway.”

There was an incident where a new employee was brought on and, when she introduced herself to Eddie, he asked if she was the summer intern. In his defense, she had a very round face and he genuinely thought she might be in college, but once Heather pointed out to him how that could be construed as a sexist comment, Eddie conceded that he might have fucked up a little bit there.

Not in those words.

 _Good_ , Heather said. _And while I have you here, we need to talk about your conduct with the interns._ If it had been litigious conduct with the interns, he would have been able to refute it very easily, as he has never so much as been alone with one of them, but apparently more than one of them had complained about his general attitude over the years. Heather then had to explain to him that interns frequently feel that they _can’t_ complain about established employees in positions of power over them, and that is why none of them ever confronted Eddie to his face.

The compromise is: Eddie has never had an intern and never will, and he sends Heather a fruit basket every Christmas for making certain of that with Erika. The rest of the HR department can go screw themselves. Heather’s the only one he likes; and that’s why Myra doesn’t like Heather.

Richie is still giggling. “Of course they don’t,” he wheezes.

“Car’s ready,” Ben says brightly. “Is there anything else you guys need before we go?”

“A loving father figure,” Richie says morosely.

Ben climbs the stairs, crouches seriously in front of Richie, and places a hand on his shoulder.

“I love you, kid,” he says.

Richie throws himself to the floor, holding his stomach, cackling.

Eddie says, “Richie, you’re the only one here with an alive dad worth speaking to.”

Richie apparently can’t respond, too busy gulping like a fish.

“I’ll be your dad,” Bev says. “I think I’d be pretty good at it.”

Richie claws himself up to a sitting position using Ben’s leg. Ben sways dangerously and steadies himself on the banister. “Okay,” he sighs, sounding winded. “Bev’s my dad now. I’m only getting you Father’s Day cards from now until forever.”

“That’ll be fun trying to find at Christmas,” Bev says.

“I’ll stock up.”

“Good luck,” she says. “It’s already September.”

“Life finds a way.”

Ben reaches out and hugs Eddie—carefully across the shoulders again. “I have keys for you,” he says. “So you can lock up if you need to go out. And if it snows, the garage door opener is in the desk, you can pull the car in.” He releases Eddie and frowns at the floor, eyes unfocused as he considers. “Is there anything else?”

“No, we’re grown men.” Richie stands up. “Give us your house and all your worldly possessions.”

“Okay,” Ben says easily, and hugs Richie.

Bev climbs up the stairs and hugs Eddie in turn. “Good luck,” she whispers in his ear. “Have fun.”

When she releases the hug, Eddie leans back a little, perplexed, to stare into her face. What does she think is going to happen here? Eddie has a hole through his chest. How much fun does she expect him to have?

“Daddy,” Richie requests, holding his arms out. When he hugs Bev she seems to vanish into his chest. “Be safe. Don’t get arrested in a foreign country. Especially not if you’re going to the Netherlands; I’m still not allowed back in the Netherlands. Well, not those Netherlands.”

“Oh my god,” Bev says, pushing him away, but she’s laughing.

As their car pulls out of the driveway, Eddie watches from the window and turns to Richie. “Are they going to the Netherlands?” It’s not that he’d be offended if they told Richie and not him. He’s just surprised, is all.

“ _Ben’s_ Netherlands!” Richie shouts, and then holds his hand out for a high five.

Eddie leaves him there in favor of hanging out with Goldie the golden turtle statue.

* * *

Being alone in the house with Richie feels… weird. Not the way that being in a car with Richie felt weird; that was an almost expected form of weirdness, the knowledge that they had ten hours and about six hundred miles to kill together. They had a goal in mind. Something to accomplish. People to see, places to be.

Now Eddie’s goals are very abstract, and almost all very long term. Accomplishing his list of things to do as soon as he got to Ben’s house made him antsier than he was before. He’s going to have to call Dr. Fox at Sovereign Light Hospital (or maybe the whole surgery department?) tomorrow to get them to fax _a doctor’s note_ to his office, like he’s not a grown-ass man who reliably gets to work early and stays late and has done so since he started at this goddamn company, but that’s something to do during business hours. Everything else seems to be things he can’t accomplish either on his own or in the rapid time he’d like to: get a divorce. Grow back part of your chest.

Make a move.

Richie is worse. Eddie has no idea what’s going on in his head, but he’s just as easily bored as he always is, and now his major form of entertainment is Eddie. He’s not overbearing—he’s not _nursing_ Eddie, which is what Eddie was afraid of, what Eddie specifically asked him not to do—but his eyes are always on him. If Richie gets up, he asks Eddie if he can get him anything. He vanishes into the kitchen and Eddie hears the fridge door open, hears long moments where nothing happens, and then Richie asks, “What do you want for dinner?” as if Eddie has any better answer to that than he did on the first night they got here.

“Beets,” Eddie says.

“God, you’re an ass,” Richie says affectionately.

Eddie feels deeply afraid that Richie is going to cook for him, but he can’t figure out how to stop it from happening. Ben lives in the middle of nowhere.

He texts Ben: _Is there a pizza place that delivers to you?_

He gets a reply quickly. _It has been so long since I ate pizza_

So that’s a nonstarter.

And at any moment, Eddie’s afraid he’s going to say something to fill the awkward silence—how can there be silence when he’s in a room with Richie Tozier? _I started to faint in the shower this morning. I called my wife; I’m really going through with it. I want you to sleep in my bed with me._

“I mean, I can probably cook, dude, but it’s gonna suck,” Richie says. There’s something awkward and apologetic in the way he hovers in the archway to the kitchen; something almost forlorn about the way he holds his arms. “Like, it will not be up to the standards of New Adventurous Cuisine Eddie.”

Eddie blinks at him. “I’m here with you,” he says. “How high do you think my standards are?”

Richie’s face brightens at once with his laugh. “Yeah, yeah,” he says.

Eddie thinks and then remembers that Ben went out again. “Did Ben buy bread?” he asks, hopefully.

They grill cheese for dinner. It’s a team effort. Eddie can stand long enough to butter bread, and even if he couldn’t, he can easily do that from a chair. Richie gasps theatrically when he looks in the fridge and says, “Holy shit, Ben has some real cheese in here.”

“Okay, the point of a grilled cheese is to get the cheese all melty, so you have to—”

“Dirty talk it; gotcha.”

“ _Cut it in thin slices,”_ Eddie says. “Not like whatever hack job you did with the burgers—”

“Those were not burgers, those were pita pockets,” Richie says. “Relax, man, I can grill cheese. I can go further than that—do you want bacon on it? Slice of tomato? Make it a full-on melt?” He leans further into the fridge, head vanishing; Eddie looks at the peaks of his shoulders where he’s hunched half in the appliance. “I think this is deli meat,” Richie says, and then there’s another long pause. “Ham,” he reports.

“Are you eating it?” Eddie asks, horrified.

“Like, a little bit.”

“Oh my god.”

They eat melts, not grilled cheeses, and Richie doesn’t even pretend to whisper seductively to the sandwiches; and they watch TV on Ben’s Netflix account on the TV downstairs. Eddie understands why Richie asked if Ben was ever a bartender: there’s a fully-stocked bar, complete with cabinets, with little lights, with rows and rows of different kinds of liquor. It looks nicer than some bars Eddie went to when he was in college. Not that that’s hard; Eddie had no money and he was going out of some overdue teenage rebellion.

Eddie doesn’t know what the sheer variety available means—is it better or worse if there’s a wide variety of different kinds of drinks? It has to be better, right? Like, there’s a lot of it, but it means that Ben hasn’t drunk his way through it all, which would worry Eddie more.

He doesn’t know anything about addiction, not really, not in real life. Dependence, certainly, but he’s never…

He almost asks Richie, but he doesn’t. He almost says something to Richie about what happened today, but he doesn’t. Instead he watches the weird sitcom on the opposite side of the couch from Richie, and slowly he tilts his head back and starts to nod off to the sound of Ted Danson mispronouncing a woman’s name, and then the next thing he knows he’s slid sideways into Richie and is half asleep on his shoulder, full and warm and comfortable.

He doesn’t know how long it is before Richie shakes him awake and says, “Come on, man, time for bed.”

Eddie thinks dazedly of Ben’s suggestion that he take the master bedroom while he’s gone, but maybe that was really just about the master bathroom in general. He doesn’t know if Ben and Bev changed the sheets before they left, and while he kind of figures that they did based on how carefully Ben prepared his house for guests, he doesn’t want to be bothered with it now.

He lumbers up the stairs and comes to a halt, and realizes that Richie’s behind him only when he crashes into him. Eddie almost topples over and Richie catches him, arm looped around his waist directly across his navel. Eddie gasps and clings to the railing, right hand coming up and holding onto Richie’s elbow.

“Shit, sorry,” Richie says. “Did I hurt you?”

“No, you almost knocked me over, dumbass,” Eddie says, disgruntled.

The idea of needing to be caught is frustrating, but in his defense it’s only because Richie collided with him in the first place. He can walk up a flight of stairs. Two flights of stairs, technically, counting the break for the landing.

“Sorry,” Richie says, and lets him go. “You threw on the brakes pretty hard there.”

Eddie has made some… less reserved social overtures, recently, than he might have otherwise when he was a little more alert. But he’s not going to admit to Richie that he stopped at the top of the stairs because what he thought was _where’s Richie going to sleep?_

* * *

He makes it to the next morning before he completely loses it.

He’s learned his lesson, as far as his body is concerned. If he’s going to work out, benign as a short walk around the house might be, he has to rest after. He needs to take cooler showers. He should be doing that anyway, just in the interest of his tissue damage. So he quickly rinses the sleep-sweat off his incisions, creeps into Ben’s room and rifles through his drawers until he finds some running shorts he can borrow, and then he goes out early in the morning to get his exercise over with for the day.

Not the stretches. The stretches are something he’s going to have to do later. And the incentive spirometer. He’s been making little notes on the back of his discharge papers, keeping track of what he’s putting into his recovery in the hopes that it means he’ll get more out of it. Not that the documentation will really affect anything; he just wants to be able to hand his doctors a bunch of data when he gets back for his three-week checkup and says, _Okay, I’ve done this so far, how long until my body starts working again?_

But it is working, he’s sure of that, because he feels something. His steps might be small and labored; he might start breathing deeper and have to slow his pace before he’s even into the woods and out of sight of the house; but he can still move. If he can’t run, he can walk. If he can’t walk—he thinks of clambering out of the bathtub yesterday—he can crawl.

He doesn’t want to crawl.

His feet are heavy and the red shoes that Richie bought him carry him through the dirt and fallen leaves and his hands are curled as warm as they can be in the pockets of his hoodie—which he really ought to wash, now that he knows that Ben’s washing machine is downstairs. He can’t lift his arms over his head to get a stretch in, but he straightens his back as much as he can and feels the responding ache in his chest. It’s early morning and the plant life around him makes the air seem damp.

He feels good. Everything seems pale green and frosted. There’s still dew on the grass and leaves. It’s better than being in New York City right now. He remembers one Saturday when he was maybe in the fourth grade, when he woke up before his mother did, grabbed a green apple from the bowl downstairs, and went out to the Barrens in a sweater and overalls. How tart the morning tasted.

He’s in a relatively good mood despite the slog, coming out of the woods ready to end his first lap, and then he rounds the corner of the house and spots Richie.

Richie is on the deck chair sitting next to the little chess set, his coffee mug in hand, idly playing with one of the black pieces. From this distance Eddie can’t see which one. His head snaps up immediately when Eddie comes into view, and he sets the chess piece down and waves at him.

Eddie does not for a moment believe that Richie is out here for the express purpose of playing chess against himself.

He does not wave back; instead he changes his course from the loop that would take him around Ben’s running route one more time and goes to stand at the foot of the wooden stairs up to the deck. He could shout from a greater distance, but it would hurt his chest, and he’s short of breath anyway.

“What are you doing?” he demands.

Richie gives him a bemused look, eyebrows hiking up, mouth flattening and his lower lip pushing out. He’s wearing the red and black flannel pajama pants Eddie saw at his parents’ place, and the long-sleeved T-shirt with the yacht or whatever on it, and his leather jacket. His hair looks crushed at the top of his head and fluffy around the sides.

He glances back at the chess set. “Somehow I’m losing,” he says.

Eddie refuses to be swayed by a sleep-rumpled Richie, however appealing. “You don’t have to keep tabs on me.”

Richie puts his mug on the table next to the chessboard and holds both hands up in the air. _Don’t shoot._ “Whoa, dude, I’m not keeping tabs on you. I live with you. Sometimes you are not in the same room as me and I notice that no one has insulted me in a little while.”

“Let me rephrase,” Eddie says. “Do not keep tabs on me.”

Richie blinks once, twice. Then he says, “I feel like you didn’t hear what I just said.”

“What are you doing out here?”

He knows—he _knows_ it’s so Richie can keep an eye on him, because Eddie’s injured, Eddie’s delicate, Eddie’s liable to faint. He didn’t tell Richie about the fainting yesterday, but Richie’s already asked him once if he’s about to pass out, so he’s suspicious. Eddie glares at him, letting the humiliation that came from lying curled naked in the empty bathtub give him strength.

He watches Richie slowly shift gears, going from bewildered to—not defensive, but bracing himself. Settling into the place from which he can guard and parry. His eyebrows relax; his expression goes a bit harder.

“Drinking my fucking coffee, Eds,” he says: a deliberate jab. Eddie knows the next step, it’s for him to respond with _don’t call me Eds_ , but he waits instead. Richie goes on. “I am enjoying the fresh air at the price of whatever ridiculous amount of money Ben paid for the property here. You know there’s a lavender farm out here somewhere? Who farms lavender?”

Eddie doesn’t let himself get distracted, doesn’t take Richie’s peace offering. “And it has nothing to do with me walking?” he challenges. He hasn’t talked to anyone but Ben about his exercise, and that was for logistical reasons, mostly. He’s surprised that Richie would get up this early, so it can’t be a coincidence.

“You walk inside too,” Richie says, voice bland, infuriating.

“You fucking know what I mean.”

“Look, princess,” Richie says, ratcheting Eddie’s temper up by a good three notches, “if I wanted to keep tabs on you, I could chase you through the woods at the heart-pounding pace of a zombie shamble. I could open the blinds in Ben’s fucking glass house and Panopticon your shit. Excuse me for enjoying a goddamn morning in upstate New York while I drink this coffee that was ethically grown and _watered with the tears of libertarians_ , fuck.”

“Do you think I’m about to just keel over in the woods?” Eddie demands. _Do you think I’m fragile? Do you think I need to be protected from everything, including myself?_

“Yeah, Eddie, I think if you went AWOL and passed out in the woods and I didn’t notice for four hours, it might negatively impact your goddamn recovery. I think you might be a little pissed at me. I think that would be warranted, unlike whatever the fuck it is you’re doing right now.”

Eddie points at him. “I don’t need a babysitter. I don’t need a nurse, I don’t need a mom, I don’t need someone in the crow’s nest looking out for me, I can take care of myself.” He did, yesterday. He handled the problem, and it was fine.

“Get back to your fucking walk, then,” Richie says. “I’m not the one stopping you! Go on! I don’t care! You can run five miles or you can lie on the lawn and jerk off, what the fuck, you’re a grown-ass man! Ignore me!”

Richie knows goddamn well he’s impossible to ignore.

“I am prescribed thirty minutes of exercise every day,” Eddie says, taking deep breaths despite the way his chest is tightening up. “This is part of my recovery, I am perfectly capable of it, I have done it before, I’m not about to black out, _and I don’t need to be taken care of_!”

Richie leans all the way back in the deck chair, crosses a leg over his knee, and picks up his mug. “Does thirty minutes of prescribed exercise come in a pill bottle too?” he asks.

Eddie’s mouth falls open and he flounders for a long moment while Richie pointedly sips his coffee. “What the fuck?” he demands, tone completely different.

Some of the mulish look on Richie’s face dissolves away, but he folds his arms across his chest and doubles down. “I’m not caretaking,” he says. “I’m the last resort, fucker, just fucking text me if you fall in the woods and can’t get up, what is the fucking problem here?”

Up until right now Eddie was pretty sure he could demand that Richie go back in the house and leave him to his walk, and that Richie would go. He would probably open the blinds again and creep on him from Ben’s house full of windows, but he would listen.

Eddie did not expect the pill thing. That and the way that Richie is settling himself in his chair means that he’s not getting off the deck anytime soon, just to be an asshole about it, just so that Eddie doesn’t get to win.

He points at Richie. “I’m doing great,” he says. He can feel sweat drying in his hair.

“Good,” Richie snaps back at him.

Eddie, as always, responds to the tone Richie’s setting and hikes it one level of intensity higher. “I’m tough as fucking nails, I’m alive, I’m coming along great, I am _capable_ of walking for half an hour, humans are _pursuit predators_ , I was made for this shit.”

“I know!” Richie says, and then pauses. “Well, not about the pursuit predator thing, I don’t know what the fuck that means.”

Eddie ignores that and presses his point, feeling Richie trying to back down, trying to walk back what he said. He’s not gonna let him. “You don’t fucking act like it,” he says. “From, like, the first night at the Jade, it was all, _‘Eddie’s so small, Eddie fits on a barbecue, Eddie, you need to get off WebMD, Eddie, are you okay?_ Like I didn’t have Ben fucking Hanscom in front of me trying to fight a bat, I was fine, I’m fucking fine. You’re always—always—”

Richie stands up very quickly and Richie is _big_ , up on the porch looking down at Eddie. At first Eddie thinks, _oh shit, I got him, Richie’s pissed,_ but he doesn’t go into that quiet stillness he lapsed into at the hotel restaurant. He slams his coffee cup down onto the table so hard that Eddie expects it to break, and then he grins widely, almost grotesquely. It does not meet his eyes.

“Always what?” Richie demands, half a laugh in his voice—but it’s a mean laugh, all _Hey, Bananaheels_. Eddie looks away, his heart thudding in his ears, his hands going shaky as he tucks them back into his pockets. “No, _you_ wanted to talk, I’m always _what_? What am I always?”

He looks back up at Richie, at how wide his grin is, at how bright and dark and sardonic his eyes are behind his glasses, and he understands all at once, that Richie is not just angry at him. This is not a blow that Eddie has dealt him in kind—Eddie is on the verge of something and Richie is _scared_ of it.

He swallows. “Holding my hand,” he says loudly, clearly, before he can stop himself. Richie’s hand on his sleeve as they ran away from the doors; Richie’s constant slump so that he can look Eddie in the eye despite _still_ being taller than him. “You’re always holding my hand.”

Some of the fervor dies within him. Richie’s smile slides off his face and he glares at him, colder than Eddie’s ever seen him.

Eddie _likes_ Richie holding his hand, wants Richie to let go of the sleeve of his jacket and wind his fingers with his, wants to hang on just to hang on, not because they’re terrified. And he _knows_ he’s being unfair, because Richie has never put up with Eddie’s shit past what amused him—he laughs as he hands Eddie a black coffee he knows he’s gonna hate, but he also shines a flashlight in Eddie’s eyes to make him let go of an inhaler he doesn’t need, and—

“What about it,” Richie says. It’s not a question. His voice is low and dangerous.

Eddie blinks once against a sudden wateriness in his eyes. It’s never been like this. His nose and ears sting in the cold. “You know what,” he says, matching Richie’s tone as best he can. He can’t go back now; he’s there. “You fucking know what about it—I—I woke up out of a _fucking coma_ to tell you I love you, and you _laughed at me_ , so don’t act like—like—”

This is not what he set out to complain about. This is not about him asserting himself; this is not the familiar and comfortable and fun verbal sparring. These are real swords. They could kill each other.

Richie’s face doesn’t change at all. He doesn’t even blink.

And Eddie has just turned and showed Richie the biggest vulnerability he has.

He knots his numb hand into a fist. Something is roiling in his gut, something made up of the squirming pleasure with which he heard Richie say _sweetheart_ and the despair with which Richie laughed it off; and Bill saying that he loved him like a little brother; and Mike tucking mittens onto his hands; and the humiliation of having to throw himself on Ben’s mercy because at forty years old he’s made so many mistakes that he practically has to go into hiding to undo them all.

“I saved you first,” Eddie says. “You saved me, but I saved you first.”

And he’s not weak and he’s not small and he’s not delicate, he’s strong, he survived _death_ , he’s big and bold and brave as Big Bill ever was, as the Losers ever made him feel, and of all the people in the world he needs _Richie_ to know that, Richie _should_ know that.

Richie breathes slowly and his breath turns to vapor in the morning air. Eddie thinks of something animal, something large and dark and dangerous, but only because it’s cornered.

He can’t look at him anymore and he lowers his eyes and sees Silver. The bike is leaned up against the wooden steps, reflective paint still shining between larger patches of rust, Mike’s playing cards still jammed in the spokes.

He grabs the handlebars before he knows what the fuck he’s doing, before he can even think about it. Silver’s heavy as he drags it away from the steps, as Richie breaks from his statue impression and says, “The fuck?” but Eddie can manage it. It’s a friendly sort of weight, familiar, the heaviness of years, and as the wheels turn it eases, something about the redistribution of force, of gravity, of resistance.

 _Where are we going?_ Silver seems to ask, like a big friendly dog. _I’m game._

Silver was named after the Lone Ranger’s horse. Bill was apeshit for the Lone Ranger, playing Wild West and gunslingers and yelling _three two one draw!_ as he pointed finger guns across the playground at Eddie. He never stuttered when he shouted _Hi-yo, Silver, away!_ And away was where Silver went. Eddie never rode double on Bill’s bike or—God forbid—up on the handlebars like Georgie sometimes did, but there were times when he thought he might have liked to. Richie went around with his cheek pressed into Bill’s back and Eddie thought darkly, possessively, _that must be nice_ , but his mother would lock him in the house all summer if she ever heard of Eddie doing such a thing. All the adults agreed that Silver was _too much bike for that boy, too big_. Bill only ever grew to be two inches shorter than Eddie is now. When Bill came to get him outside the pharmacy Eddie stepped up onto that rear wheel like it was nothing, because it _was_ nothing, nothing at all to put his hands on Bill’s shoulders and no one to stop them. They sailed along, they went _fast_ , nothing could beat them, nothing could catch them.

He wants some of that, in a way. He wants to be big, to be undefeatable, to be the guy everyone looks up to. He wants Richie to look at him like that, to see him like that, not weak or delicate or broken or numb or drugged. He just wants to be alive and have the wind racing past his ears, tugging at him, unable to keep up.

He pulls Silver clear of the stairs and slings his leg over the side and onto the far pedal, easy as anything, easy as stepping up behind Bill. It’s like Silver moves of its own accord, like Silver’s something alive under him, but for once in his life Eddie’s big and strong and brave enough to keep up.

What he does not account for is that no one has mowed Ben’s lawn for him while he was away in Derry on what he thought was a suicide mission.

The grass tangles the wheels. Eddie feels the snag and pushes harder against it, remembering that it was always harder to bike through grass but that it could be done. The mechanics seem to want to work with him but they slow and get hopelessly caught, and when his right foot drives down on the pedal the bike stops moving. Eddie can’t get his foot up and clear on that side, and he topples over, his left leg dragging Silver on top of him. His numb right hand swings out to catch him and the jolt of his weight drives all the way up into his arm, his shoulders, catching the worst of it before he rolls onto his back and lies there in the grass.

He made it maybe fifteen feet. Tops.

There’s a hammering sound of feet on wood, then a pause, then the crushed sound of Richie landing on the lawn. Within seconds he’s leaning over Eddie, face just as panicked as Eddie remembers when Richie was under him and wearing Eddie’s blood.

“Fuck,” Richie says, eyes wild. “Are you okay?”

Eddie lets his head loll back in the grass. Is he okay?

He closes his eyes. He starts to laugh.

What else can he do? The pain is exquisite, stretching all the way down from his throbbing shoulder toward the right side of his ribcage, aggravating the bruising on his torso. For all he knows, he tore a stitch in his incision when he threw his arm out like that. The pain pulses in time with the pounding in his head and the laughing makes both of them worse, but he can’t stop. It’s fucking hysterical. He’s an old man and he wiped out on the lawn and it wasn’t even doing something impressive, it was riding a bicycle, which is something you’re so intrinsically supposed to remember how to do that there’s an _idiom_ about it in _the only language Eddie speaks,_ fuck! It’s the simplest slapstick humor he would have lost his shit over when he was seven years old and watching cartoons, except it isn’t even interesting, it’s just pathetic. He’s back to the start.

“Did you land on your back?” Richie asks. “Did you hit your head—come on, Eddie, give me something to work with here—your stitches—you crazy son of a bitch.”

This last comes out exasperated rather than worried, affectionate, and Eddie laughs harder because he loves him.

He gently gets his left leg high enough to swing clear of Silver, sliding apologetically out from under it. Silver is heavy on the grass, one of its wheels giving an aborted half-turn and then giving up. Eddie wonders if he’s going to have to apologize to Bill for this. He has to put his right elbow down on the ground to lever himself up, and he moans when he does it. It hurts, it hurts a lot to push up, but he does it, he’s strong.

“I’m not bad,” he tells Richie, and laughs more at the dumbfounded look on his face.

He doesn’t mind being a crazy son of a bitch, doesn’t even mind the way his laughter is jostling his broken ribs. He can’t fault Richie for that. Richie’s kneeling next to him looking like he might be getting ready to run a field concussion test on him, but Eddie’s not broken, and he’s not scared. So he reaches out with his left hand, the one with feeling in it, and spreads his palm over the nape of Richie’s neck, and half uses his weight to pull himself up, half reels him in.

Richie opens for him the second their lips touch and that makes something in Eddie’s gut twist in pleasure. He steals the little gasp right out of Richie’s mouth. Then Richie’s pushing forward, kissing him back, and Eddie goes hot and shaky with relief, anesthetic as anything, getting what he wants, finally.

Richie’s hair is soft in his fingers and Eddie can feel the shape of his hairline where it tapers down the back of his neck, the little knot of bone at the top of his spine, the way his head thrusts forward when he moves his jaw, catching Eddie’s lower lip. Richie kisses him like he means it and Eddie feels dizzy and hungry and he _needs_ it, this is it, this is fucking everything, _yes_. He tightens his grip on the back of Richie’s neck and tries to shift his weight off his hand pressed into the dirt; he grabs Richie’s shoulder and Richie makes a short soft sound into his mouth. Eddie goes a little lightheaded chasing it, getting up on his knees and tipping Richie’s head back with the force of how they’re kissing, the tips of their noses brushing together, mouths opening wider. Eddie slides his tongue along Richie’s lower lip and Richie makes another sound—longer, throatier thanks to the angle, to how Eddie’s holding him open. Eddie has to get closer to him. He pushes down harder, trying to get their shoulders closer, their chests.

Richie tucks his chin down and breaks the kiss. “Eddie.”

“No.”

Eddie chases him, gets their lips back together, nudges Richie’s head back to the angle he had. He doesn’t want to talk about it, he doesn’t want to answer questions, he just wants this: Richie’s breath hazy and labored and hot against his skin, Richie so open and vulnerable with his throat exposed to him, Richie moaning in his mouth. He slides his hand up the back of his head to hold him—he loves his hair, loves how clean and light it feels, loves how he can feel Richie’s shoulders shift with a shiver when he does it. A hand touches Eddie’s knee and he thinks _yes_ , thinks _please_ without ever actually thinking of where it’s going.

Richie breaks the kiss again. “Honey.” His voice is so soft, so hushed.

“No, I want—” Eddie kisses him again, slides his tongue behind Richie’s teeth, and Richie lets him. He tastes like black coffee. Eddie likes it better than he ever has.

The sound that comes out of Richie’s throat is a whine, and then he breaks it off when he pulls his head back, leaning away from Eddie. Their mouths split apart with a wet sound and Richie says quickly, like he’s afraid Eddie won’t let him get the words out, “Honey, I know, there’s a fucking bike in the way.”

Oh. Eddie opens his eyes and looks down at Richie’s face—the flush over it, the shine on his lips that’s no doubt Eddie’s saliva. That shouldn’t be hot but it is. He gets a determined look as he grabs Eddie by the hips with both hands, fingers catching in the waistband of Eddie’s borrowed shorts and twisting to get a better grip, and then he _lifts_ Eddie up by Ben’s athletic shorts. Eddie startles at the sudden constriction, at the unexpected pressure against his soft cock, and he fears for the integrity of the fabric, but then Richie’s hauling Eddie and his trailing legs clear of Silver and pulling him up into his lap, and Eddie doesn’t actually give a fuck about the borrowed shorts anymore.

Eddie says, “Fuck,” when Richie sets him down on top of his thighs. One of his hands braces the small of Eddie’s back—he’s on a slope here, held up by the way he’s clinging to Richie and the strength of Richie’s hands, and if Richie lets him go or leans forward he could topple them both into the grass and lie on top of him, push him down, kiss him like that, _fuck_. Eddie leans forward instead, flatting himself against Richie, Richie’s head already tilting back to kiss him again. His glasses reflect the sun and Eddie himself where he obscures the light.

It’s good. It’s really good. Richie’s mouth is soft and relaxed because he wants it, wants Eddie, pushes back into it when Eddie lips at his mouth. Their teeth click like they’re teenagers but Eddie doesn’t mind; he knows Richie, knows his rhythms and the way he pushes and pulls, and part of him just wants to bite down on Richie’s lower lip to feel it soft between his teeth. Then it occurs to him that he can, so he does. Richie definitely moans for that, as Eddie tests the give with his incisors and then kisses it gently, sweetly, runs his tongue across it to lick Richie’s wounds for him.

Richie tightens the hand still locked on Eddie’s hip and hitches him higher to stop him from sliding. God, this is good, Eddie’s solar plexus up against Richie’s chest, letting his back arch forward so he can get closer. he thought he wanted to be so close they occupied the same pace, too close to breathe, too close for the laws of physics to know what to do with them. So he tries for it, free hand sliding down and holding onto Richie’s shoulder, pushing under his arm to hold himself up better and to find the shape of Richie’s scapula under muscle, to run his thumb across the bone plate and feel where it gives into soft skin. He thought the attraction was too big to encompass something as simple as sex, and now he feels it—that aspect of this _want_ tangled up in the sheer joy of being on Richie, of knowing he wants him too, of the span of him under his hand and pressed up against him and the taste of him, the stroke of his tongue against Eddie’s. Eddie wants to _devour_ him, wants this full encompassing feeling, this settled and satisfied and _hot_ feeling not just around him but inside him, filling up his stomach, strong holding him up and heavy in his gut.

Richie’s lips pull at his for a few seconds before he tilts his head back and says, voice strained, “Eddie, baby, my knees.”

For a moment Eddie’s brain whirls with nothing more coherent than _if he wants me to touch his knees, I’ll touch his knees_. Then he remembers that they are both forty years old and Eddie’s currently resting a buck fifty on Richie’s knees, and that Richie himself is sitting on his ankles. Their joints can’t handle this.

He lets go of Richie’s hair and puts a hand on his collarbone, leaning back so that Richie can slide him down to the ground. Dew from the grass sinks into the seat of Ben’s shorts and Eddie cringes a little. Then Richie’s getting his knees out from under him and grimacing and rolling his eyes as he puts his feet flat on the ground. He reaches out for Eddie and Eddie goes to him without conscious thought, pressing his slick mouth against Richie’s with more enthusiasm than accuracy. Stubble grates his lower lip and he shivers, adjusting. Richie holds one hand between Eddie’s shoulders and throws himself backward onto the ground like he’s giving up, dragging Eddie on top of him.

They should have done this a million years ago.

It’s undeniably a more suggestive position, Eddie between Richie’s legs like this, and Eddie can’t get hard right now but Richie clearly can. The knowledge makes heat pulse through Eddie’s gut, little shocks of it running from his pelvis down the insides of his thighs to his knees. When they breathe their stomachs touch, inhalations swelling them like balloons. Eddie feels curiously lightweight and hollow against Richie’s solidity, against the realness of him between Eddie and the ground.

This is real. This is real, this is it, Eddie can have this, it’s okay, Richie’s kissing him back, Richie’s shaking a little but holding him back just as tightly. Eddie’s heart races and his head spins and he realizes he’s definitely hyperventilating. Passing out _in Richie’s mouth_ would be mortifying, so he lifts his head to break the kiss and focuses on breathing steadily. The ache of his ribs is present, but Richie is warm pressed up against him.

Richie looks at him from behind his glasses, eyes dazed and half-lidded, lips slightly parted. When he sees that Eddie is just trying to catch his breath, he strokes a finger along the side of Eddie’s neck. Eddie shivers as he draws little swirls there.

“What were we talking about?” Richie asks, voice as low as Eddie’s ever heard it while he’s still being him.

Eddie barks a sharp laugh that aches along his breastbone. He tucks his chin, looking down at Richie’s Adam’s apple, his collarbone. He leans down, settling over him, and idly grazes his lips across the exposed skin. Richie’s knees go tight on his thighs and then relax.

“I told you that I love you,” Eddie says. He tries to keep his voice soft and it’s easy here, in this close little space between them. “And you said, ‘Sweetheart, they’ve got you on the good drugs, don’t they?’” When he does Richie’s Voice he lets it go as lazy and hot as he feels, stretching out into something approximating Richie’s sweet and condescending drawl. Then he plants a kiss like a stamp on Richie’s throat. _Mine._

“Oh,” Richie says airlessly.

A wobble of uncertainty goes through Eddie’s stomach. Richie pushes a hand through Eddie’s hair, carding it and then resting so that Eddie can lean his temple up against the heel of his hand. It’s tender, being held up like this. Sweet. Some of his anxiety eases.

“Of course I love you,” Richie whispers, and Eddie’s chest tightens down. “Of course.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I'm going to take a little bit of a hiatus until maybe May 15, because I'm challenging myself to complete a fic in that month before I come back to this one. If I finish early (and there's a non-zero chance I'll finish early) I might post again before that, but I don't know yet. In the meantime, you can find me here in the comments (I swear I'll go through my backlog of replies, I just haven't been feeling it since quarantine started), on my fandom tumblr at tthael, or on my fandom twitter @IfItHollers. Thank you so much for reading!
> 
> Edit: Lots of lovely art for this chapter!
> 
> [Eddie being mad about Richie's feet](https://twitter.com/miliitem/status/1251253472697221125) by [finn @miliitem](https://twitter.com/miliitem) on Twitter
> 
> [painting](https://twitter.com/eaturheartoot/status/1254946927482933249) by [eaturheartoot](https://twitter.com/eaturheartoot)
> 
> [comic part one](https://twitter.com/oofa_doofa/status/1256002617404243973) and [two](https://twitter.com/oofa_doofa/status/1256228318132817927) by [Oofa_Doofa](https://twitter.com/oofa_doofa)
> 
> [sketch](https://twitter.com/TheArtSharki/status/1258474259095023616?s=20) by [sharki](https://twitter.com/TheArtSharki)


	14. I Need Help

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Richie is handsy. Eddie threatens him with a fork, but his worst enemy remains himself.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *shows up back from hiatus with serious bedhead* Uh, y'all want... *checks notes* Fluff?  
> Well, tough, this is Indelicate, we're gonna have a side of angst.
> 
> Content warnings: typical medical stressors including non-graphic descriptions of stitches and puncture wounds; Eddie has a lot of health anxiety and intrusive thoughts this chapter about his wellbeing and his body image. Richie tries to figure out boundaries without any direct talking about it, _because that would be too simple, wouldn't it, boys?_

Eddie doesn’t know how long they spend frantically making out like teenagers. Time gets weird in that space—everything is crushed grass and leather and Eddie is distracted trying to get Richie to suck on his tongue hard enough that it aches deep in his mouth. This is something he only now knows that he likes, but he has decided to chase it with the determination of the persistence predator he was just yelling about being. There is very little of his brain still on reserve for practical concerns, and most of that he’s dedicating to not actually drooling on Richie’s face.

It has _never_ been like this. He has never lost his damn mind over kissing. After decades of _technically_ being sexually active, Eddie did not think he was capable of losing his mind. There was always something in the back of his head—concerns about _what if someone hears me, what if they have something and they don’t tell me, what if they have something but they don’t know, what if they can tell how bad I am at this_ —that stopped him from trying too hard, getting too carried away. Getting carried away at all. And honestly who in his life was he going to trust like that, to go through the awkward transition from rational human beings to people who shoved their tongues in each others’ mouths? Better to keep all his messy, gooey, unclean feelings to himself. Kissing is gross and—juvenile, and—inappropriate in public, meant to be reserved for private spheres, and—

He is brimming on the verge of hysterical laughter. It’s really stupid. It’s also really good. Richie continues to offend him by refusing to be gross when all the laws of the universe indicate that what he does should be gross. Maybe it’s the fact that they’re kissing on a lawn in the middle of the woods, and nobody’s going to hear them. Maybe it’s that Richie’s spit seems so much less repellent than the spit of everyone else on the planet—something to do with Eddie’s childhood conviction that spit was like blood without the red, and Richie has already given him blood. And Richie doesn’t taste like coffee so much anymore but instead tastes like both of them, like nothing at all except heat. And Eddie has the assurance that Richie does not care about how bad he is at French kissing. He is virtually assured that Richie will make fun of him for it later, and Eddie will snap back at him and make fun of something about him, and it will be fine.

Everything is fine, with Richie. Everything feels allowed. The idea that that’s okay—that it doesn’t matter if Eddie fucks this up, that he has some kind of safety net under him and it’s Richie sprawled in the grass blithely ignoring the rest of the world around him too—that it’s a relief so strong his head spins and his ears roar.

Or that’s the hyperventilation. Because Eddie’s definitely still hyperventilating. He can’t get his breathing to match Richie’s correctly, because there’s so much else about Richie to pay attention to, which means that sometimes he sucks in a breath just as Richie exhales and it boils down hot into Eddie’s lungs. There are trace amounts of oxygen that respiration doesn’t completely extract. Eddie’s not going to suffocate. Richie can breathe for him just fine, just for a few moments. The air is right above them if Eddie needs it.

And then the alarm goes off.

Eddie jumps so hard there’s an answering clutch of pain from the muscles in his back, and he makes a strangled sound into Richie’s mouth, and his brain goes _WHAT THE FUCK_ before he realizes that Richie isn’t dissolving under him like a good dream. Because that would be the way that Eddie’s luck trends, these days. He gets a moment of impossible bravery and the world just smites his ass for getting above himself.

But no. It’s not a wake-up alarm. It’s the alarm to tell him that his half-hour walk is over. The alarm sound is the same, because it's a new phone and Eddie hasn't fucked around with the settings yet, but he's definitely conditioned to feel a wave of rage as soon as that melody starts playing.

Richie starts laughing. Just lies on the ground in the wet grass—which is cold, now that Eddie is paying attention to his knees and the clammy feel of his clothes again—and laughs helplessly, the full-on boneless laugh that Eddie always felt was like winning a prize. Now he’s losing it over a phone alarm.

It kind of cheapens the accomplishment.

“You asshole,” Eddie mutters.

He’s sprawled with his head tipped back, and Eddie can feel the muscles in his abdomen jerk, the hitching rise and fall of his ribs as he gasps for breath. “Not to be—indelicate—” he guffaws.

His voice is lower than Eddie’s ever heard it, but he’s laughing and still _loud_. The effect is a Voice Eddie’s never heard before, one that seems to come up from so deep in Richie it might as well be the ground and he’s just a mouthpiece, as he always insisted the Voices were. But this one seems very Richie—quintessentially Richie—and it makes Eddie flush hotter.

“—but is that a vibrator in your pocket—or are you just—happy to see me?”

He moves under Eddie like he might curl away and protect his head, but Eddie has never tried restraining him like this before and it’s very effective. Clearly Richie’s survival instinct was warranted, because Eddie feels the urge to attack Richie when he’s being annoying but somehow transposes that into biting at his throat, gently, more to see what he’ll do than anything else. Richie makes the switch from laughing to moaning so effortlessly that Eddie’s ears ring.

And the fucking marimba is still going off. If he couldn’t hear it, he would assume that the crazy fluttering under his ribcage was psychosomatic. His phone is still pinned between their bodies, trapped in the pocket of Eddie’s hoodie.

Eddie groans and puts his left elbow on Richie’s chest so he can lift himself up and get into his right pocket. Two things happen at once: Richie grimaces, because Eddie always had pointy knees and elbows and that has not changed; and there’s a stab of pain through Eddie’s torso so sharp that his breath catches and he freezes, just his fingertips in his pocket. He lets what breath he has. When his ribs contract they ache.

Richie goes from pliant and careless under Eddie to rigid and alert. Eddie still has him pinned, but he lifts his head and looks sharply up at him. “What is it?” he asks.

Eddie closes his eyes and draws a deep breath. The deepening ache along his sternum, the tightness along his side under his arm, those are just signals, his body trying to warn him that something is wrong. He is very aware that there’s something wrong, thank you very much, he can tune that message out. Richie is uncharacteristically quiet and still as Eddie breathes, and the fucking marimba is still going off.

It’s been less than a week since he got out of the hospital. He was technically hurting before he decided to walk, with every intention of eating breakfast and taking painkillers before he went back to sleep. Then he fell off a bike and climbed all over Richie.

“Ow,” he manages. His brain floats concepts at him—popped stitches, internal bleeding. He’s still a little lightheaded, but Richie’s a solid, warm, grounding force underneath him. He can’t consider those worst-case scenarios right now. It won’t do him any good.

“Hey, what’s the play here, Eds?” Rich asks. “You got it, or?”

“I got it,” Eddie replies, fishing his phone out of his pocket and hitting the button to turn off the alarm. Then he flops back down on Richie, pushing his face between Richie’s neck and shoulder. Under his thighs, he feels the muscles in Richie's legs tense and relax. “I maybe overdid it.”

“That’s the Eddie Kaspbrak motto,” Richie says. “No do like overdo.”

“I don’t think that’s a thing,” Eddie replies.

“No kill like overkill.”

“Is that from a video game?”

“Basically,” Richie replies calmly. Eddie hears the little click in his throat as he swallows. “You just gonna hang out there?”

“Yeah, deal with it,” Eddie says.

Richie laughs under him, jostling him lightly. “All right.”

There are birds in the trees around them. Eddie can hear them again. That and Richie’s breathing.

He’s very tired, suddenly. Now that the real world has been called back to him. Not the real world the way he would have thought of it a month ago, the world of work and the city and millions of people moving around him, all of whom he had to be at least peripherally aware. Now the real world is just things other than Richie, who has a curious anesthetizing effect when Eddie zeros in on him.

He misses it already.

“I gotta check my stitches,” he mumbles into Richie’s throat, the hot damp of his skin. “And eat. And take painkillers. And get some sleep.” He considers for a moment and then adds, “In that order.”

“Okay.” One of Richie’s hands rests in the small of Eddie’s back, heavy and still. Richie could hold him there—hold him tight. That would be… something.

“I don’t want to get up,” Eddie admits. The dark of his closed eyelids is welcoming; Richie is warm under him, despite the leather jacket’s general failure to be cuddly. Even the morning dew soaking the back of Eddie’s hoodie and Ben’s running shorts seems to matter very little. “I’m gonna fall asleep on you out here.”

“I mean—you can try?” Richie says. “I’m not gonna say my structural integrity is that great, you fall asleep on me and maybe neither of us will be able to get up later.”

“Enabler,” Eddie mutters.

Richie laughs once through his nose. “I can’t feel my toes.”

Which helps Eddie to remember that Richie was apparently barefoot when he took a flying leap off Ben’s deck. For some reason, despite the very real presence of his injuries and incisions, it is much easier to get up when he’s horrified at the very unlikely possibility of Richie getting hookworms.

“Oh my god.” Eddie grits his teeth and rolls off of Richie, then sits up as steadily as he can despite responding pain in his chest. He won’t be doing the Dracula deadlift that he and Richie used to practice on the playground any time soon. “Oh my god, you’re gonna get, like, soil-transmitted parasites, go wash your feet, Jesus.”

“No, Jesus washed other people’s feet,” Richie says. “I mean, other people washed his feet, too, but Jesus definitely did not wash his own feet.”

Eddie stares at him, up on his knees now. “Are you hypoxic?”

“I don’t know what that means, but probably,” Richie says easily. He pushes himself up on his elbows. Eddie’s hands fist in his hoodie against the urge to reach out and touch him. Richie adjusts his glasses but leaves his hair as crazy as it is. Some of that is from just being flat on the grass. Some of that is probably from Eddie. He feels a great rush of affection for Richie's curls.

Some of that is _definitely_ from Eddie.

He takes another breath, feeling some constriction in his chest. He doesn’t have a grass allergy. Or a pollen allergy, for all it’s October. He’d be losing his mind over this if it were March. But he's fine now. He's fine.

He’d be _finer_ if he’d gotten an allergy panel while he was in the hospital and could have some concrete evidence that he doesn’t, in fact, have a grass or pollen allergy. But it’s weird and unfair that his body wants him to prove a negative, so he’s going to argue with it a little bit.

Also he definitely wiped out on a bicycle and hit the dirt, in direct violation of _Call! Don’t Fall!_ , so he should probably focus on that first.

He puts his left hand down on the ground and pushes himself up. The action causes a responding wrench in his chest, and he grits his teeth and makes a noise like the forty-year-old man he is as he pushes himself up. The sudden distance his blood has to travel to make it to his brain seems to confuse his body, because his vision fogs out black and white stars froth in front of his eyes, and then the rest of the world fades in around him again.

“What the fuck?” Richie says, and tries to bounce to his feet. Tries, being the operative word.

Apparently he wasn’t kidding when he complained about his knees (and honestly a very emotionally sensitive part of Eddie feels a little relieved that he wasn’t kidding, as though _let’s keep making out but let’s make out lying down_ is anything to quibble about). He pitches forward and almost into the grass again. He catches himself and straightens up again, hissing, and then comes over to Eddie, holds Eddie’s face in his hands, and rests his thumbs on his cheekbones.

“You okay?” he asks, looking like he might get back to that field concussion test.

Eddie lifts his face up in a wordless request for more.

“Fuck,” Richie says with feeling, and then kisses him again.

Eddie hangs on to the sides of his jacket; he wants to lean into him, but his chest really does hurt.

“What the fuck was that about the prescriptions?” he murmurs, his lips brushing Richie’s as he speaks.

Richie makes an incoherent growling noise. It is not hot. It cannot be allowed to be hot. “I don’t know, I thought you were going to call me a pervert.”

Eddie leans back a little bit and squints at him. “Why the fuck would I call you a pervert?”

“I don’t know,” Richie says, which is what he said when authority figures asked him _why_ he did things, which means he's lying.

He tilts his head and looks in Eddie’s eyes. Such unfiltered intimacy is almost painful; Eddie has to fight and instinct to hide his face. Instead he focuses on the black rims of Richie’s glasses. Freshman-year-of-high-school Eddie would be happy to learn at last that there’s really no trick to kissing someone with glasses, that it doesn’t seem to make a difference at all.

Richie smiles. “Your pupils are going—” He releases Eddie’s face with one hand and rapidly contracts and releases his fingers.

Eddie shoves him. “Shut up.” But he doesn’t actually want Richie to go away, so he reels him back in with the hand in the jacket. Richie just lets Eddie shove him around, as if Eddie doesn’t know for a fact that if Richie didn’t feel like cooperating, Eddie could not budge him.

Which describes so many things about Richie, now that he thinks about it.

They kiss again, sticky and too intimate for what is technically the great outdoors, when satellites could see them and put them on Google Earth or something. When Eddie’s head starts spinning dangerously again he lowers it to rest his forehead on Richie’s chest. _Fuck_ , Richie is big.

“Okay, I gotta go sit down before I black out again,” he mutters. It’s not the first time it’s happened, but when there were more people in the house it was easier to get away with unnoticed.

Richie jerks, jostling Eddie slightly. “Again?” he asks. “That was what that was? Fuck. I don’t think I could carry you again if you up and dropped.”

“Probably could,” Eddie says into Richie’s collarbone.

Richie snorts. “Yeah, that’s wishful thinking. Up stairs? I’ll spot you, but if you drop before we get to the stairs, you’re out of luck.”

Despite the flippant tone, he looks at Eddie with some apprehension, and Eddie realizes that he’s waiting for Eddie to start moving to the stairs. Eddie shakes his head and resigns himself to leading the way. Letting go of Richie and walking back up to the house feels painfully awkward now—like, _yes, we’ve acknowledged_ one _of the many unspoken things we’ve been dealing with, now let’s go upstairs and make out on Ben’s couch some more. After I check my stitches, eat something, and take some drugs._

Richie takes his first step toward the stairs and hisses in pain again.

Eddie turns around. “Seriously, did I break you?”

“Physically? No. But I’m old, I jumped off a porch, and then I tried to balance an entire Eddie Kaspbrak on my joints, so—”

“No, please, tell me more about the pain you’re in,” he drawls, trying to cover up his embarrassment at the mention of either of those things.

Richie’s giggles tend toward the hysterical. “God, you’re such an asshole,” he says gleefully. There’s as much affection in it as there is in _sweetheart_ or _honey_. Eddie flushes hot.

He has to lean heavily on the banister as he climbs up to the house. Richie is extremely close behind him—so close, actually, that Eddie almost wants to turn around and demand he take a step back, but if he does that, they will end up kissing on the stairs again. Eddie’s in pain, but also he feels like he’s opened the floodgates of his self-control for the first time in forty years. How is he possibly supposed to stand in the way of that?

“I’m going to check my stitches,” he says loudly as they step into the house, both to Richie and to himself.

“Yeah,” Richie says. “You—uh, food? Water?”

“Yes,” Eddie says stupidly. “Please.”

He’s in the bathroom with his hoodie off, raising his arm to check his intercostal incision's stitches, when he hears Richie coming down the hallway. He grabs a towel and holds it up in front of himself, but instead of opening the door, Richie knocks like a civilized human being. No wonder Eddie’s surprised.

“Do you have water in there?” Richie asks. “Because I have… Yeah.”

It's a bathroom. Of course there's water.

Eddie swallows and realizes that his throat is bone-dry, all of his stress landing on him very heavily now that Richie’s an accessory to medical checks rather than the center of his attention.

“Okay, I’m—” His voice comes out thin. He takes a deep breath, feels a responding ache in his sternum, and says, “Give me one second.”

He doesn’t know what he’s going to do with that one second. It’s not like there’s anything more to be accomplished here, standing half-naked with a towel clutched up over his chest like a Victorian maiden. He probably shouldn’t be holding it to his wound, because these towels that Ben has are very nice and fluffy, which means they’re fibrous, which means that Eddie is probably getting foreign material in an open wound and—

He takes another breath. It rattles in his ears when he lets it out. He’s almost too afraid to look at the line of stitches right in front of him in the mirror. His brain wants to tell him that starting with the intercostal incision, under his arm, is the best way to ease himself into the possibility of popped stitches, a call to Dr. Fox, and a trip to the local emergency room. He doesn’t want any of that. He just wants to get to have _one good thing_.

“Eddie?” Richie asks.

“Yeah?”

There’s a pause before Richie asks, “Do you need help?”

 _Fuck_.

The answer is, probably yes. Eddie has stitches on his back that he would have to check by twisting around and looking over his shoulder in the mirror, or hunting through Ben’s linen closet to see if he has an easily accessible hand mirror, as if anyone has a hand mirror these days, when everyone has phones. Or, Eddie could try to look at his stitches with his phone mirror, which is a possibility but leaves him subject to the resolution of a knockoff iPhone camera, which is not something he has a lot of faith in anyway.

The point is, Eddie doesn’t think that he’ll be satisfied that all his stitches are intact until he sees them with his own eyes, and he can’t really see the back stitches with his own eyes. Or he’ll see the stitches with his own eyes and he _still_ won’t be satisfied, because the same part of his brain that’s very anxious about his modesty towel’s proximity to his gaping chest wound will tell him to keep looking, keep hunting for any discrepancies in the little asymmetric lines above and below his puncture wounds, tell him that when he threw his arm out to catch himself he probably landed on his incision and god only knows what that did. Or Eddie would, if he had the balls to pick up his arm and check.

He wants his inhaler so bad right then. He can practically feel the pressure of it in his mouth.

They were just kissing. He doesn't want to be thinking about the long-gone and unnecessary inhaler; he wants to be thinking about Richie.

“Water would be good,” Eddie says weakly.

Another pause. Then Richie says, “Okay, do I open the door or—”

“For Christ’s sake,” Eddie hisses, the sudden irritation flaring and moving him to jerk the door open.

Richie is holding two bottles of water and a Tupperware container of fruit in his big hands. The fruit has a fork jammed deep into the center, like a flag planted on the surface of the moon. He looks at Eddie like he thinks Eddie is going to bolt for the bathroom window and try to exit the house that way.

To be fair, Eddie has attempted some very inadvisable physical feats just within the last half-hour.

“Thank you,” Eddie says, taking one of the bottles of water out of Richie’s hand and draining the whole thing. Fuck _little sips_. He chugs it like he’s at a college party underage and trying to show off. Then he sets the empty bottle on the countertop and looks back at Richie.

Richie is continuing to stare directly at Eddie’s face. Objectively the bathroom is no hotter or colder than the hallway immediately beyond it, but Eddie’s immediate instinct is to close the door in case of drafts.

“I can check your back while you eat, if you want,” Richie offers quietly. As though he knows that this is killing Eddie, he offers a smile. “We’ve got an infinite supply of fruit salad, since Ben apparently has spent the last thirty years playing Fruit Ninja in real life. I think it’s curing my scurvy.”

“You don’t have scurvy,” Eddie says.

“You don’t know that.”

Eddie has just become intimately acquainted with the inside of Richie’s mouth; he is more confident about the solidity of Richie’s gums and the absence of mouth sores than he is about anything involving his own body.

“Even Big Macs have lettuce on them,” Eddie says instead, because the idea of reminding Richie that minutes ago Eddie stuck his tongue down his throat is _excruciating_. He looks at the fruit, convenient distraction as it is.

Also—his stomach grumbles—he’s burned a lot of calories this morning already, and he’s pretty damn hungry. If he doesn’t eat something soon, he probably will have another dizzy spell and maybe actually faint.

And here’s Richie, offering to expedite the check-up process for him so that he can go fall asleep again for the rest of the morning. All Eddie has to do is turn his back to him.

The roar of despair comes up deeper and stronger than Eddie expected. He’s momentarily overwhelmed by _this is not how I wanted this_ and _this isn’t fucking fair_. It hits like a hammer blow to the chest. Like getting stabbed all over again, as a matter of fact.

“I don’t want you to look at my stitches,” he croaks.

“That’s fine,” Richie says immediately. “I’m just—” He gestures with the water bottle and Tupperware of fruit. Prop comedy has never exactly been his specialty. “I can—you can do whatever you have to, it’s—”

“No,” he interrupts, resigned. “I can’t.”

His face burns with humiliation. He can’t do whatever he has to do. In this case, he can’t take care of himself, and he doesn’t know why it’s so important that he takes care of himself all by himself, really, forty is extremely late to try to establish independence, and while this is something of an outlier as far as Eddie’s normal activity goes, he feels like relaxing his death grip on his self-sufficiency is like admitting that Myra was right, that Sonia was right, that all along Eddie has been helpless and needed someone to take care of him, and he doesn’t want that to be Richie, he doesn’t, they just took one step forward and—

Richie, eyes glued to Eddie’s face instead of his naked torso (because why would he _want_ to look?), raises his brows and gives him a sidelong look. “Are you okay, man?”

 _Honey._ Now they're back to _man._

“Fine,” Eddie manages. He swallows again. “I know you’ve cleaned them up and—like, I know you know what they look like, I just. Don’t want you to have to see them.” He gives an abortive shrug and then hisses in pain.

Richie’s expression has flattened out in confusion. “You don’t want me to have to see them,” he repeats, as though he doesn’t understand what Eddie _literally just fucking said_.

“Well, yeah.”

The look that Richie gives him in response reminds him so strongly of the look he wore while shining a flashlight in his face and wrestling something out of his hands that Eddie almost reflexively hisses at him. Richie scrunches his eyes shut like he’s fumbling for his patience.

“Okay, I know we’ve had this conversation like eight times since you woke up,” he says, and Eddie understands that he means _out of a coma_ and not _this morning_. “So I know I’ve made it perfectly clear that I love you and I want to be here and I want to help you if you need it—”

The _I love you_ makes Eddie shiver and Richie notices, which is mortifying. He pauses and then lifts his eyebrows at Eddie again.

“Okay, okay, it’s not about the—I just don’t want you to see them!” Eddie snaps back. “They’re fucking disgusting! Maybe that’s not what I want you to think of when I take my shirt off for—!” _For the rest of our lives_ , actually, is how that sentence wants to go, but Eddie manages to reel it back and strangle it to death before it can get out.

But Richie caught the goddamn preposition. Immediately his expression shifts, going alert and watchful. “For what?”

Eddie looks toward the mirror, then realizes that their reflections are still there, and instead tries to avert his gaze toward the shower instead. But that has its own connotations. He brings his glare back around at Richie. “Fuck off.”

Richie grins like a wolf. “Take your shirt off for what, Eddie?”

“What the fuck do you think?” Eddie snaps back at him. Richie _knows_ how stupid Eddie is for him now, he has to, that particular cat is out of the bag. He’s forty and he won’t be made to feel embarrassed over a crush.

Richie takes a step into the doorway and Eddie automatically steps back, then wants to kick himself. Ceding ground is the wrong move here—not because he’s scared of Richie, but because if you give Richie an inch, he sinks his teeth into it.

“Because you want me to look at you?” he teases. “Because you want me to touch you?”

Eddie throws the towel at him.

Just throws it over his head, and snatches the fruit out of his hand and thunks it onto the countertop, heedless of grapes spilling onto the stone or how disgusting it is to have food in a bathroom.

Objectively, Eddie knows that these are probably not things that Richie would be disinterested in, based on how he dragged Eddie into his lap and then on top of him out there. But they sting to hear, as though they’re impossible and Eddie should feel ashamed for even thinking of such things. They can’t happen _now_ , so what’s the point of bringing it up?

He reaches for the door to close it on Richie.

Richie is unfortunately not a very stupid housepet, and so is not thwarted by Eddie literally throwing a blinder on him. He swats the towel off of his head, it falls to his shoulder, and Eddie—with his arm extended to grab the door—feels very exposed and thin and pale and probably the least sexy he’s ever felt in his life. Richie’s gaze drops to the vicinity of the big hole in Eddie’s chest, because its gravitational pull is just like that even to Eddie himself, and then back up to Eddie’s eyes. He sees that Eddie saw him see, and now they both have to fucking acknowledge it.

Eddie spins away from the door, furious. “Fuck!” he says, like he stubbed his toe. There’s a little drawer under the sink where he hides his toothbrush, and he opens it and slams it shut, just to help him get through it.

“Shit,” Richie says, voice no longer teasing now that he knows Eddie’s really upset. His face is white in the mirror.

Eddie glances at him and then continues glaring at the Tupperware, which is made to hold things and therefore is being given Eddie’s problems.

“I’m sorry,” Richie says. “I shouldn’t have pushed.”

“You—” Eddie cuts himself off, because he’s not even mad at Richie right now. He’s mad at himself for kissing Richie earlier, for not waiting until he’s healed and maybe a little scarred but perfectly functional, and then he and Richie can do all the kissing and mutual eyeballing they want. They could have kept—kept dancing around each other, if that was what that was. Richie never made a move, and Eddie could have kept putting it off, until he felt like it was time to go to Richie, until the _right time_.

And then he feels stupid. (More stupid.) He’s forty years old. He should know by now, from years of experience, that if he waits for the _right time_ , he’ll never get started.

He takes a breath, braces his hands on the counter, and admits, “Yeah, I need help.”

Richie doesn’t move, just looks back at Eddie in the mirror. “Okay.”

Eddie waits, blinks once, and then clarifies: “Your help.”

“Yeah, I got that, man,” Richie says.

Because Richie.exe seems to be crashing, Eddie gives up and begins furiously eating fruit. He bites down on the tines of the fork in his hurry and winces. The pineapple burns his tongue, but in a _this is acidic_ way, not a _your mother was right, you’re allergic to pineapple_ way. He waits.

Richie tilts his head all the way back and looks up at the ceiling. “Honey, I have no fuckin’ idea what’s going on in your head right now,” he says plaintively.

 _Honey_ is for when Richie told him he loves him. For good moments. Eddie looks around at him, mouth still full. He chews and swallows, resisting the urge to cover his mouth, because the actual act of eating is so undignified. It doesn’t fucking matter: this is Richie, and he’s still eyeing the doorframe instead of looking at Eddie.

“I just want you to kiss me again after this,” Eddie admits, embarrassment making the words come out almost as a mumble. Wants him to _want_ to kiss him again, but admitting that will absolutely get Richie singing 1970s pop, and it's too horrible to admit out loud.

Richie jerks his head back down. “Oh, not a problem, dude,” he says, so quickly and with his eyes so wide that Eddie has no choice but to believe him. Which is. Something.

Feeling like something discovered under a rock and dragged out, squirming, into the light, Eddie winces. “ _Man. Dude. Bro.”_

Richie sets the water bottle on the counter and starts shrugging out of his jacket. “Sweetheart,” he presses. “Sugar. Honey.”

It turns out that, no matter how defeated he feels, Eddie’s body has opinions about Richie taking off his clothes and calling him endearments. He winces again, knows what Richie’s going to say, and then looks up to make eye contact with him in the mirror.

 _“Eds,”_ they say simultaneously.

“God fucking damn it,” Eddie mutters, and shoves a piece of honeydew melon into his mouth. He has never enjoyed honeydew melon. At least in the bowl with the pineapple it tastes less bland. Like grass on a sunny morning.

Richie pushes his sleeves up past his elbows and starts washing his hands in the sink. “Gloves?”

It’s not like they have a sterile environment here. Eddie shoves the box of nitrile gloves towards him along the countertop.

Richie puts them on without commentary, a rarity for him. He snaps the blue material against his wrists. He doesn’t even waggle his fingers litigiously at Eddie, just steps to the side to stand behind him. Eddie watches in the mirror and sees Richie’s arm bend at the elbow, so it’s not a complete shock when he feels a light touch at the top of his spine.

“Can you put your head down a little?”

Eddie chews his mouthful of food, swallows, and bows his head so that Richie can see better in the wall lights set over the mirror. Richie _should_ just take a step back to get a better view, but he doesn’t. Instead he stands too close and runs a fingertip down Eddie’s back, along his spine, instead of along the line of his incision. He stops before he gets to the wound and the black bruising around it.

Eddie does not shiver, but his stomach tightens up. Mixed anxiety because _oh god, Richie is looking at him_ and something like anticipation, also because _oh god, Richie is looking at him._

“They look basically the same?” Richie offers. “Nothing looks like it tore or fell out or anything. Do they hurt?”

The stitches don’t hurt so long as he doesn’t stretch the skin around them. The ache from the injury starts so deep in his chest that in comparison the incisions don’t matter much.

But Eddie asks, “Where they sewed me back together when I was literally murdered by an alien? Yeah, they bother me a little, thanks for keeping up, Rich.”

Richie huffs a laugh. “Pick your head up.”

Eddie frowns as he raises his head and looks at Richie in the mirror. How’s lifting his head going to help Richie look at his back better? But Richie’s not looking at his chest or his face; he’s looking at his chest and the incisions there. Eddie doesn’t even have time to scowl before Richie loops his arm around him, this time lightly touching just below Eddie’s collarbone. Eddie feels his eyebrows shoot up and he stares as Richie furrows his brow and slowly traces a line down his chest.

“What the fuck are you doing?” Eddie demands, all of his anger fizzled out.

“Checking your stitches,” Richie replies without looking up. “I think these look pretty symmetrical too?” One side of his face scrunches up as though he’s uncertain. He’s still looking at the reflection in the glass, not down at Eddie’s actual body.

“You can’t see that,” Eddie scoffs. He doesn’t know what Richie thinks he’s playing at, but it doesn’t feel like medical necessity. The possibility of popped stitches is a very serious matter, and Richie’s not treating it with any seriousness—but when Eddie looks in the mirror, he doesn’t see any obvious inconsistencies in the neatly spaced line of stitches. “You can’t possibly see that.” He gestures up towards his face in the general vicinity of his face to indicate glasses.

Richie gives a small smile. “Honey, I’m farsighted, I can see you better there than here.” He squeezes Eddie’s shoulder with his other hand. Eddie’s body tries to squirm away from and into the touch at the same time, going up on his toes in surprise for a moment and then catching himself. This time the pet name (ugh, Eddie hates that phrase) sounds genuine, instead of Richie making a point. His smile widens into a grin. “Yeah?”

“Fuck you,” Eddie says, more reflexive than anything else. “What do you think you’re doing?”

“Just checking to see that my Eds is in full working order,” Richie says, lapsing into something like a British accent. In his own voice he asks, “It’s raising your arms that hurts, right?”

Eddie swallows. “I can check that one on my own.”

“I know,” Richie says easily. He runs his hand down Eddie’s bare arm and stops just above Eddie’s elbow. The hairs on Eddie’s forearm stand up. Richie grins wider.

“I can and will stab you with this fork,” Eddie says.

“Yeah, but from this position you’d have to go for my leg, and—” He closes his fingers around Eddie’s arm. “Pretty sure I could hold you. Is slow better?”

“What?” Eddie asks, distracted by the idea of Richie holding him.

“Bringing your arm up. Does it hurt less if it’s slow?”

“I can lift my own arm.”

“I know,” Richie repeats, more deliberately now. Hands on Eddie’s elbow and shoulder, he kisses the top of Eddie’s head. “Let me look at you.”

Eddie flushes and closes his eyes rather than deal with the reflection of Richie being very big and very broad behind him. His breathing is coming a little shorter than he can blame on pain. He swallows and says, “You know, I don’t need you to be turned on by the stitches either.” Just in case Richie’s decided to err on the other side of the spectrum.

Richie snorts. “You dumb bastard, you stuck your tongue down my throat, I’m gonna be stiff for more than four hours.” His dismissive tone is at odds with the way he carefully lifts Eddie’s elbow, trying to separate Eddie’s bicep from his side.

Eddie _burns_. He might have thought, in so many words, about shoving his tongue down Richie’s throat, but if he can’t stand to hear about it out loud, he suspects he probably shouldn’t do it. It’s not even the crass phrasing, it’s blatant acknowledgement: Richie got hard, Richie might _still_ be hard, right behind him. Eddie could take a step back and press flat to Richie’s chest and maybe feel him bump up against his ass.

Eddie’s lightheaded.

“I hope not, at your age,” he says, and tries to focus on the deeply weird mental image of Richie staring into his armpit, for distraction. “I think—is it blood clots? Is that why you’re not supposed to, uh.”

“You’re asking me? Was Viagra one of the pills that didn’t make it to Eddie Kaspbrak’s traveling pharmacy?”

No, because admitting he couldn’t get hard—voicing that, either to Myra or a doctor—would have been admitting that there was a problem. And with any luck, that'll turn out to be an issue of orientation, not erectile dysfunction. He has erectile dysfunction _now_ , but he also has a ventilation hole cut through his chest, and maybe there's causation there.

Eddie scowls with his eyes shut and says nothing. Richie chuckles. Eddie brandishes the fork and Richie laughs a little louder.

He feels the hand leave his shoulder, so he knows something’s up and he manages not to jump when he feels a light touch on his side, just under his ribs. But he does say, “Um,” voice louder and higher pitched than he meant it to be.

“So you’re gonna bruise,” Richie reports, conversational except for how he’s talking directly into Eddie’s ear. "All along here." He runs his hand down Eddie’s side towards his hip, and Eddie squirms. “Ticklish?”

“Only when someone’s _tickling me_ ,” Eddie growls.

Richie kisses his temple. “How’d you land? Couldn’t get your arm up?”

Mostly on his hip, tending toward his back. Not far enough back to be worried about his kidney.

“Did I pop any stitches or not, dumbass?” Eddie demands, eyes still shut. He’s afraid to open his eyes and look at Richie holding him like a ballet dancer, with his arm arched up over his head.

“Nope,” Richie says. “No stitches missing, no incisions gaping, nothing poking out of them. You’re in tip-top shape.”

“Ugh.”

Eddie still has very large wounds in his chest. They’re puncture wounds—well, two sides of one wound, and you don’t sew those up. He can still smell them every time he takes off the bandages, except for now, when he can only smell fruit juice and nitrile.

He becomes aware, slowly, that his head is resting on Richie’s shoulder. He straightens up again, mortified, stepping to the side and out of Richie’s hold. Richie lets him go easily, and when Eddie opens his eyes he just sees him standing there, looking faintly smug.

“What the fuck are you laughing at?” Eddie growls. He blindly puts his hand down on the counter three times looking for the box of alcohol wipes, and then finally shoves them at Richie. “Make yourself useful.”

Richie cracks up. “Okay, okay.”

* * *

But Eddie can’t turn his brain off.

Richie keeps his hands to himself while he wipes down Eddie’s stitches, and he says nothing horrifying like _hey, I can’t help but notice that you’ve got foreign material in your stab wounds_ , so in theory two of Eddie’s major stressors ought to be settling. Instead, Eddie’s brain looks for something it can pick at until it hurts.

Looking at his own injuries will not make this better. He will just keep looking until he finds something wrong, and if there isn’t anything wrong, that means he’ll never stop looking.

He finishes his fruit, swallows his painkillers, and resigns himself to going back to sleep.

He should probably retreat into the guest bedroom. He’s had a lot of excitement for one morning.

Instead he retrieves the electric blanket, spreads it out on Ben’s low leather couch without plugging it in, and looks expectantly at Richie. This is difficult because Richie is on the other side of the house in the kitchen. Eddie gets up, walks to the kitchen, and watches Richie rinse out the Tupperware, put it in the dishwasher, and then jump about a foot in the air when he finally spots Eddie.

“Christ,” Richie says, clutching at his chest. “What are you still doing standing?”

Eddie scowls at him. The whole stitches-checking process took maybe twice as long as it had to because _someone_ was flirting.

“Come on.”

Richie follows him back out to the living room, looking bemused. Once he spots Eddie’s set-up, he gets a knowing look that irritates Eddie immediately. “I thought you were sleeping,” he says, as though Eddie has suggested anything contrary to the idea.

Eddie drops down to the couch and pulls at Richie’s wrist. The bone stands out prominently at the joint, poking out from under the sleeve of the yacht t-shirt.

Richie says, “Honey, I’m not gonna—”

Eddie swings his legs up onto the couch and makes himself comfortable.

“—okay,” Richie interrupts himself, and climbs onto the couch and flattens Eddie against the back.

The couch is about as wide as a twin bed, and to be honest, so is Richie, probably. Eddie has to lie on his left side because it’s the only side of him without stitches, and it’s not always comfortable when he wants to roll over. He has vague memories now of trying to sleep in his cast, at thirteen years old, and rolling onto his broken arm in the night.

The experience is a thousand times improved when Richie pushes him up against the tufted leather and kisses him. Eddie goes hot, and his lightheadedness doesn’t seem to matter, and Richie keeps a gentle border of space between their chests so as not to hurt him, holding Eddie at the shoulders. Eddie puts his tongue in the well of Richie’s bottom lip to feel the shape. The corners of Richie’s mouth keep tugging up in a smile.

At last Eddie breaks away to demand, “What the fuck are you laughing about?”

This, of course, makes Richie actually laugh, low and intimate within the boundaries of the couch formed by their bodies. He’s so _fucking broad_ that Eddie can’t see beyond the rise of his shoulder. He takes up the entire field of view.

“You’re really cute,” Richie says.

Eddie curls his lip in disgust and irritation. “I am n—”

Richie leans forward again, eyes closing, and Eddie automatically does the same. The rest of his protest turns into _“nnnh”_ mumbled straight into Richie’s mouth.

It’s not frantic, or urgent. It’s indulgent, and slow, and so hot that Eddie keeps unconsciously dragging his feet across the blanket, just enjoying the fucking stimulus. They have nowhere to be and nothing else to do, and at some point the painkillers start to kick in and the sensation of something sitting on his chest eases. He feels himself start to relax almost against his will, kisses getting slower and clumsier, until Richie laughs again.

“Am I boring you?” he teases.

Eddie drops his head, yawns into Richie’s chest, and shakes for no. He is not… _nuzzling_ , or _nestling_ , or anything of the sort.

“Drugs,” he explains simply.

One of his feet slide between Eddie’s. It should tickle, but it doesn’t. “Falling asleep on me?”

“Yeah,” he says quietly. He hooks his fingers in the yacht t-shirt to indicate that he means it literally: _hope you’re fucking comfortable, ’cause you’re trapped now._

“You can just say you want to cuddle.” Eddie loves how low his voice is. It shoots straight through him down to his toes.

“I don’t want to cuddle, I’m a grown man.”

Richie slides minutely closer, adjusting how they’re cramped together so that he can put his lips on Eddie’s hairline. “Fucking liar.”

“Shhh, I’m sleeping.”

He feels Richie chuckle under his spread hands. Richie has _topography_ , flat planes across his chest and a valley down the center of his breastbone. He’s soft across his stomach—Eddie wants to make his hands into fists and knead at him like a cat. He should not be able to sleep next to this. It is evidence of the painkillers’ influence, that he can even contemplate falling asleep next to this.

Holy fuck, he’s going to sleep next to Richie. The romance of the idea, simple as it is, nearly takes a baseball bat to the back of his skull. Eddie’s gonna sleep beside Richie and Richie’s gonna let him.

Because Richie loves him.

Richie says into his hair, “Cute, cute, cute,” and punctuates it with a kiss.

Eddie wants to protest that he’s not cute. He doesn’t want to be cute. He ought to be spared that after forty years. Instead he wants Richie to want him with the same ferocity he’s struggling with, trying to stop himself from gathering fucking handfuls of him.

Is Richie holding back because it’s too early for that? Because he thinks that Eddie is too fragile for that now?

That’s a problem for later. Right now he just feels… nice. His brain gives up on the _what now, what does he want, what are we allowed to want_ , because clearly this is fine. Richie hums quietly into the top of Eddie’s head, lips and throat buzzing pleasantly. Eddie’s hands give up on their greedy aching. He becomes less and less aware of his body as he mimics Richie’s breathing, matches it, and sinks down.

* * *

The leper is standing over them.

Eddie almost kicks it. His body doesn’t move and Richie, asleep with his face smushed against the blanket, doesn’t wake up to see it. Is completely oblivious to the danger behind him, standing over them when they’re vulnerable.

No. No, Eddie waited his whole life for this. He gets to have this. He just does.

“Fuck,” he mutters, and wakes himself up.

Richie is not sleeping, actually. He’s holding his phone above Eddie’s head so he doesn’t disturb him, and his glasses are still on. Eddie’s a little relieved to find that these recurring nightmares have inaccuracies like that.

“Hey,” Richie says. “You hurting?”

He doesn’t hurt, really, but he’s itchy as fuck and that’s almost worse.

“Can I have some ice?” he mumbles, aware of his sleep breath and trying not to blast Richie in the face with it.

“Yeah.” Richie shifts and sits up slowly. “Trying not to fall off this couch,” he mutters, almost to himself, and gets up.

Without his body heat, Eddie feels immediately colder. He yawns as he listens to footsteps down the hall, hears the crack of the freezer door opening.

“Uh, you want a fuckton of frozen peas?” Richie asks.

“Sure,” he calls back, half asleep again already and unable to be as loud as Richie with his lung fucked up as it is.

When Richie comes back and slings the frozen peas over his bruised side, he makes a little incoherent noise of relief. Richie cracks up again immediately, too loud to ignore.

“What?” he demands, grouchy and aware of it.

“You keep making sex noises, dude,” Richie says.

Eddie’s brain throws on all the power switches. All the lights flood on upstairs. It gives him an instant headache.

 _“What?”_ he demands.

The recurring leper nightmares—though the leper in name only now, since he neither has leprosy nor resembles aything other than Eddie himself—are not in the least bit arousing. Eddie was under the impression that he can’t get aroused right now. What the fuck is his body doing without his permission?

“Yeah, like at the Cinnabon.”

He sits down on the edge of the couch and leers at Eddie. The leather cushions bend under his weight.

Eddie relaxes immediately, sinking back into the couch. He shuts his eyes. “Jesus, I thought you meant, like, right now.”

He adjusts the frozen peas so they’re up against his chest incision. Immediately it feels like his core body temperature drops. But his incision _thinks_ it’s being scratched, which is exactly what he needs. The frozen peas are more malleable, as a unit, than ice in a towel would be.

He’s not worried about the sex noise thing. That’s not what he sounds like in bed, on the rare occasions when he has been undignified enough that a noise slips out. Those moments are few and far between. This is just Richie, being Richie.

“Why? Dream something hot?” Richie asks.

“No,” he says emphatically, eyes opening again.

Apparently this flat refusal is very funny, because Richie chuckles at it again. “Going back to sleep?”

“Yeah, come here.” He makes grabby hands.

Richie lies down again, careful not to touch the bag of frozen peas. “Guess it’s harder to kick me out of bed if there’s no bed.”

Eddie makes himself comfortable, resisting the urge to literally move Richie’s body around to make him as comfortable as possible. He does not yet know what behavior Richie might indulge in that might, hypothetically, make Eddie kick him out of the bed. The idiom _I wouldn’t kick him out of bed for eating crackers_ floats through his mind, though he can honestly say he’s never used that in his life.

 _Someday, Richard, when you have a grown-up house, you too can eat Ritz crackers in bed,_ Maggie Tozier intones wisely.

 _The height of luxury,_ Richie replies.

Eddie would not kick him out of bed for eating crackers. But if Richie ever tries that on clean sheets, Eddie will lose his shit.

“If I sneeze, you’re gonna fall off this thing,” he points out—very reasonably, he thinks.

Richie hums in response, not a short little noise but a musical line. Something vaguely familiar. Eddie cracks an eyelid and looks up at him expectantly, and Richie sings the line: _“It’s not easy, being green.”_ He pauses and then repeats the exact same melody: _“Eds could sneeze me off this thing.”_

Eddie gives a short laugh that makes his head pound. “That’s good.”

“That’s what you’re into. Muppet humor. I’ve cracked the code.”

Eddie has a vague memory of Richie, at fourteen, going through a formal grieving process when Jim Henson died. He had not previously professed any affinity for Jim Henson, and he hadn’t spoken of the Muppets since at least the second grade, so this was a surprise to everyone, and then it rapidly became annoying. It ended when Bill tried to drown Richie in the quarry, in May, before school even let out for the summer. Eddie remembers sitting on the grass, shivering from the cold water, trying to be conciliatory as Richie lay face-down and half-naked on the ground and they both pretended it wasn’t Richie’s own fault to begin with.

Eddie loops his arm over Richie’s side. This drags them closer and Richie’s chest comes into contact with the bag of frozen peas. He hisses and squirms a little, and Eddie ignores him, instead finding his spine with his fingertips. He can feel the hard line of it, pronounced against the soft rises on either side. Richie’s so fucking big. Eddie’s in love with it.

“Frogface,” he mumbles.

“You’re sweet,” Richie replies dryly.

Eddie’s stomach tightens in mixed pleasure and anxiety. He leaves off his idle stroking and tries to go back to sleep.

He manages it, but this time he has weird sleep paralysis dreams in which he’s convinced that, unless he hides them in the blanket, Richie will get up and rub melon on his bare feet. It is debilitating, how much sleeping Eddie fears this course of events even as he accepts them as logical cause and effect. The silver lining is that there is no supernatural influence to this nightmare at all.

Richie murmurs, “Fuck, your feet are cold,” and throws a corner of the blanket over their legs.

Eddie makes a muffled grunt of thanks. The foggy influence of the painkillers drags him back under once more.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't care if I'm being inconsistent about whether Richie's farsighted or nearsighted; if that's the case, I'm retconning it!
> 
> There's been some beautiful fan work for this fic and I need to go back through the fic with the links, and I never got around to responding to comments like I meant to, but if I don't post this now I think I'll never get back on the horse, so please be patient with me. I remain incredibly awed and humbled by the response to this fic and the talent of my readers.
> 
> UPDATE:
> 
> [Richie and Eddie cuddling](https://gentlyyearning.tumblr.com/post/618301539301441536/had-to-spit-this-out-after-reading-the-newest) by [gentlyyearning](https://gentlyyearning.tumblr.com/) on tumblr


	15. Maybe Went Overboard

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Eddie tries to work out what to do now. Richie tries out a) being a lizard and b) second breakfast, in that order.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings: Eddie starts to have a panic attack in this chapter and tries to calm himself by regulating his breathing, so if you want to skip that jump from "sinking sense of dread" to "a shaky exhalation" on the page.
> 
> Other content warnings: Eddie's experience with compulsory heterosexuality; Eddie's relationship to sex and sexuality is not healthy right now but he's trying; mention of hypothetical outing; staggering clumsily through relationship negotiations; the suggestion that Ben might be a cannibal; Michel Foucault's Panopticon; _Monsters, Inc._ reference; Eddie has unrealistic expectations about recovery and you can bet that's gonna come up again.

In Eddie’s old house back in New York (and he feels a guilty thrill of relief of thinking of it as an old house, like he’s running away from home the way he always wanted), he wouldn’t have been able to sleep this close to Myra under any circumstances. They bought a queen-size bed with Eddie’s savings from the Atlantic Limited job, because they just needed the room. Then when Eddie got promoted, they upgraded to a king. Eddie had once floated the idea of a California king for their ten-year wedding anniversary, because they deserved it, but Myra thought it was excessive.

Secretly (not so secretly) Eddie longed to be excessive. To no longer have things meted out for him in careful rations, careful drips and drabs. They almost never ate out—portion sizes in the US are out of control, after all. With the groceries they bought from the store they adhered rigidly to serving sizes. Two and a half Ritz crackers at a time.

Honestly, Eddie probably wouldn’t have married Myra (barring all the reasons he absolutely should not have married a woman) if she’d been overtly materialistic. He thinks it would have put him off. What Myra had in her favor was that there were no obvious strikes against her while they were dating, which was what Eddie was supposed to be doing at his age, so there was no reason not to go further and get married, which was what Myra felt she was supposed to be doing at her age. If it ain’t broke, why not marry her?

( _Because you like men, Eds. Get it together_.)

Eddie wasn’t exactly starting out when he and Myra got married—he was young enough, but fairly established in his career and ready to progress onwards, able to support a family. That was what was important. He wasn’t some young twenty-something out blowing his paycheck on clothes or food or shows or travel or cars or whatever it is people blow their money on. And Myra—and this is to her credit—was relieved that Eddie had money, but she didn’t feel she needed it beyond the necessities. She liked the security of it more than she liked what Eddie could spent it on.

When Eddie started making a little more—becoming _well-off_ instead of just _comfortable_ —he thought about the things he ought to be able to treat his wife to, living in New York. But Myra didn’t really like shopping (sometimes came home in tears, when she went out looking for clothes with her mother and sister, even for events), and they agreed that honestly going to see classical music played was kind of boring, and so many of the tourist traps in New York were just too overcrowded to enjoy, and working left them tired and crotchety so they didn’t really want to do things in the evenings anyway.

Once they went to see an off-Broadway production of _Fiddler_. Myra thought that the show would be “good clean fun.” Eddie looked over after “If I Were a Rich Man” and saw her crying silently. That was the last show they went to.

The first marriage counselor they saw was a very nice woman named Kathy who asked what they liked to do for quality time together. Eddie felt like he was failing therapy already and hummed and hawed before he finally admitted they didn’t really do much for quality time—no weekends upstate, no couple’s cooking lessons, no nature tourism, whatever. Myra had looked confused. _But we have quality time together all the time!_ she said. She meant evenings where they watched TV together, or when they did the crossword on Sunday mornings, or when she sat up in bed and read her book while Eddie fretted about work the next day.

Eddie, who always felt that there was something he should be doing, that he should be _providing_ in some way, who wanted to be in motion and felt hopelessly penned in by inaction, was astonished to learn that those moments were enough for her. That she didn’t feel they had to be doing anything. That sitting side-by-side—that was good for Myra.

Is that love? Eddie wonders, waking from hazy dreams where he’s trying to play tennis but can’t lift his arms high enough. Is it doing nothing and enjoying it?

Because Richie is still there, still awake, with his glasses on, just holding Eddie with a bag of frozen peas squashed between them. Eddie blinks at him and he glances down and winks at him. If it had been an over-the-top gesture, that would have been fine, but Richie seems to mean it, which means that Eddie has to avert his gaze.

He stares at the yacht on Richie’s shirt. It’s crushed on his chest, the face of the woman on the boat peering up beyond the bag of now-thawed and just kind of wet peas.

“What the hell are you wearing?” he mumbles.

Richie sighs. “Ah. The most combative way to begin phone sex.”

“Oh my god,” Eddie says.

“Ah. The least enthusiastic way to end phone sex.”

Eddie snorts at that. “This is real life, dumbass.”

“Yeah, but if you want to have actual sex, you’re gonna have to wait for me to defrost, buddy.” Richie shifts in place, stretching his shoulders back. More of the woman on his shirt appears from behind the bag of peas. Eddie watches the flex of his pectorals. “Because somebody left an iceblock on my nipples for four hours.”

Eddie’s head snaps up, thoughts of Richie’s chest clearing from his mind. _“Four hours?”_ he demands.

Richie seems nonplussed as to this reaction. There’s stubble standing out on his chin; he hasn’t shaved. Hasn’t moved. His lips are no longer swollen. It’s like nothing happened at all.

“Not a big deal, it’s only, like, noon,” he says.

Eddie groans and shuts his eyes again. Half the day is gone. He might as well give up on the rest.

“Hey,” Richie says.

Eddie considers whether or not he wants to play along with whatever he’s about to pull.

Having garnered no reaction, Richie repeats, “Hey. Hey,” and pokes the top of Eddie’s head. His tapping fingertip is pretty gentle, actually, but it’s still fucking annoying as a woodpecker on the side of a house.

Eddie looks back up at him. There’s a smear all along the lower edge of his glasses, so at some point they got mushed up against his face. Eddie doesn’t remember that.

“What?”

“How high are you?”

That was not what Eddie was expecting. “What?”

Richie leans a little closer and for a moment Eddie thinks he’s about to kiss him again. His heart rate picks up, mixed anticipation and nervousness because he needs to brush his teeth—but he doesn’t want to say that when Richie’s so close and hit him in the face with his morning breath. He’ll wait. And Richie doesn’t close his eyes, just gets so close to Eddie’s face that their noses almost touch. Eddie’s eyes almost cross and he looks from one lens to the other, baffled, wondering what the fuck’s about to happen.

“Bumblebee,” Richie says seriously. He hits each syllable hard. The word bounces out of his mouth.

Eddie stares at him for a long moment, and Richie holds his straight face—opens his eyes wider, tilts his head back a little further, seems to vibrate with intensity—until Eddie starts to crack. First his lips tremble. Then his breathing hitches. Then Eddie gives up, rolls over as far as he can, and laughs.

“I knew it!” Richie crows.

Eddie shoves at him a little bit and instead pushes the bag of peas into his chest. It’s wet. Despite that the electric blanket is not on, he gets nervous about getting it wet—there are wires in it, he can feel them, and this thing is a safety hazard to begin with. He braces one hand on Richie’s shoulder and sits up, grimacing; then he grabs the bag of frozen vegetables and throws it onto the table.

“You’re a cute little lizard,” Richie tells him. “With your big old eyes.”

He holds both index fingers up on either side of his face and mimes a chameleon’s eyes moving independently. Then he drops his jaw and holds his mouth low and tight and closed, tilting his head back further, and sticks his tongue out repeatedly. The effect is surprisingly lizardlike.

“What the fuck?” Eddie shrieks between laughter.

Richie’s grinning too. “You know, you’re a lizard! You sleep on the warm blanket, not under it.”

“Lizards don’t have blankets,” he points out.

“Well, if it’s hot rocks you’re looking for—” Richie pats his own bicep. “—you better call a geologist, I think I got something you’ll like.”

“Oh my god.” Eddie puts a hand on the yacht on Richie’s t-shirt and finds it wet from meltwater—he yanks it away immediately.

“See what I mean?” Richie asks.

“Why are you _damp_?” He understands the cause and effect perfectly well; this is more a general frustration kind of question. “And what the hell are you wearing?”

“Pajamas,” Richie replies easily. He splays one massive palm out and mimes writing on a notepad. “High Eds—likes lizard humor. Doesn’t like geology humor, or moisture.”

“Those are not pajamas,” Eddie says. Richie looks like he should be taking an idle stroll through a gas station at three in the morning.

“Yeah, but you’re just saying that because there’s a body of water on it, and you don’t like moisture.”

“You look like—like your idea of dining out is going to Wawa. Like you tried to go deer hunting and the actual deer hunters threw you back.”

“That is what happens, when deer hunters don’t approve of you, they rig up a big slingshot and just—” He mimes launching a slingshot. Then he reaches down and tugs at the red and black flannel. “Come on, I had to get, like, pajamas for other people’s houses.” He looks behind him for the edge of the couch and then carefully gets up.

Eddie has no idea what this means. “Do your home pajamas have bedbugs?”

Richie stretches when he gets up, inhaling deeply through his nose and holding his arms up over his head, his hands laced together. He holds it for several seconds. Eddie stares at how the hem of the detestable t-shirt lifts up a little bit, just enough to show a pale strip of lower back. He looks soft.

Richie drops his arms and looks down at Eddie, grinning. Sure he’s been caught, Eddie freezes.

“Nah. I sleep naked,” Richie says, and casually wanders down the hall. He gives Eddie a few seconds to digest that before he calls over his shoulder, “You want bacon? I want bacon.”

Eddie stares at his disappearing back—the stretch of fabric across his shoulders, the loose red and black flannel falling from his thighs to just above his ankle, the sharp jut of bone—and feels a stab of _absence_ in his chest. He’s not breathing. He inhales slowly, through his nose, and feels no relief, and realizes with a sinking sense of dread—here it comes. All his stress.

He should get up, say he’s going to go brush his teeth, say sure, he wants bacon, and then freak out very quietly somewhere out of the way. He does need to clean up, anyway, and once this is over—it will roll through him and leave him shaky and sick, but it will end—he can take care of himself, and then come back out of the bathroom ready to face the day and face _Richie_.

His next breath in rattles as his throat constricts. Phone—where’s his phone? It was so annoying earlier, and now he needs it.

He remains lying on the couch, opens up the stopwatch app, and watches the little clock start to run. The seconds and fractions of seconds start to add up. He tucks his forearms to his chest so he can feel his ribs expand, his hands in clumsy fists to stop their shaking. How long should he breathe for? _Seven_ , he thinks. _Lucky seven._ He waits for the stopwatch to take him to the next multiple of seven, inhales for seven seconds, holds for seven seconds, exhales for seven seconds.

His brain, frantic in his skull, tracks Richie clanging around in the kitchen, opening cabinets and fucking around with pots and pans. That’s not Eddie’s problem. Eddie is recovering from a serious injury— _just an injury! An injury could happen to anyone, and he’s bouncing back better than most!_ —and all that he has to do is breathe for seven seconds, hold that breath for seven seconds, and then breathe out for seven seconds.

The timer runs. A minute passes, then two. The tightness in his throat and chest doesn’t seem to loosen, but that’s okay, because it will. Either it will loosen, or Eddie will pass out, and it’s not like he’s going to stop breathing when he’s unconscious.

_Except he did, once, and Stan had to breathe for him, and Richie had to beat his heart for him, and Eddie didn’t know it happened, and—_

“Richie,” he says. His voice comes out as a wheeze.

Richie stills in the kitchen, all cooking sounds coming to a halt. “Did you say something?”

“Come here,” Eddie says, because if he says _Help_ he thinks Richie might go through a wall.

Richie pads back out of the kitchen, soft sound of bare feet on carpet. Eddie does not look up. He keeps his eyes on the stopwatch. This will end. There’s no use in getting upset over how much time it’s already taken, because it will come to an end, and Eddie doesn’t have anything else to be doing.

On his next count of exhalations, he says, “If I pass out, make sure I’m breathing.”

“What,” Richie says flatly, all ease going out of his voice.

That’s not Eddie’s problem either. Eddie’s job is to keep breathing. That’s something he has control over. Richie will work it out on his own.

“Oh, fuck,” Richie says, voice thin and sharp at the edges. “Water. Would water help?”

Eddie, holding his breath now, nods.

Richie goes back into the kitchen so fast that he shakes the house—the walls tremble as the floor distributes Richie’s force. Physics. Something.

Eddie loses count. That’s fine. He knows his multiples of sevens. He starts over.

It doesn’t take long for Richie to come back with the bottle of water. Eddie doesn’t look at him, just keeps breathing—in through his nose, out through his mouth. The pain in his chest is getting more pronounced, but it’s just his broken ribs mad at him for the workout, probably. _No do like overdo_. He’s dimly aware that if he sat up, his head would spin, but in this recline—not quite the recovery pose, but he can’t lie on his right side right now—he just feels _light_. Made of air. No substance to him.

Richie kneels next to the couch. “Hey, buddy,” he says, cracking open the bottle with one hand. “You still here?”

Eddie nods and looks away from his phone screen. He holds his hand out for the bottle and Richie passes it to him—cold, condensation, on his nerve-damaged hand. He sips from the bottle carefully, without raising his head. Sarah the nurse would be proud.

Drinking naturally upsets his careful rhythm of breathing, but it also makes him a little more aware of having a body at all. The water’s cold as it slips down his throat, not substantial enough to feel all the way down, seeming to vanish into nothing. Just enough to keep his mouth wet.

Eddie lets out a shaky exhalation. “Fuck,” he says.

Richie is big-eyed with concern. “You good?”

A faint spark of irritation flares and then dies inside him. Eddie tries to chase the source, but it’s probably just not wanting to be taken care of.

Well—it’s different, if he asks for it.

“Touch my hair,” Eddie demands, closing his eyes and lifting his head.

Richie’s laugh comes out surprised and a little shaky as well. “Are you a cat?” he asks.

Eddie feels a careful touch just at the ends of his hair. He hears the stroke, more than he feels it.

“Not like that,” he complains, pushing his head forward into Richie’s hand.

“Oh my god, you are,” Richie says, and sinks his fingers into Eddie’s hair like he means it.

Eddie lets himself go slack almost immediately, and Richie pushes his fingers back from his hairline. His nails scrape faintly, pleasantly. Eddie feels a shiver building up and remains carefully limp, and the shiver shudders out somewhere in his chest, behind his ribs. It feels good. No need to get up. He feels a little shaky in general, so maybe he’ll take his damn time.

There’s probably both dried and fresh sweat in his hair right now. Ugh. And he’s just making Richie run his hands all through it.

Feels good though.

“Sorry if I’m super gross,” he mumbles.

“Oh, _super_ gross,” Richie agrees cheerfully. He moves his fingers in little circles across the top of Eddie’s head. “Totally not an adorable kitty-cat at all.”

“Don’t make that a thing,” Eddie says, wrinkling his nose in distaste. “I am not into that.”

“Eddie likes: scalp massages. Dislikes: cats.”

He doesn’t actually know if he dislikes cats. Domestic animals are by definition kind of unclean, because you can’t expect an animal to keep to human health standards. But cats are always bathing themselves, and Eddie doesn’t know if he actually has any allergies, and he doesn’t know if there’s anything to that myth of dogs’ mouths being cleaner than human mouths, or how that would transfer to cats, whose saliva is actually toxic. He has very few feelings about housepets in general.

“Dislikes being compared to cats,” Eddie says. He opens his eyes.

Richie is smiling a little, but as soon as he sees Eddie’s watching him his face goes carefully blank again. He tugs lightly at Eddie’s hair. Eddie’s breath whooshes out of him in something like a sigh.

“Better?” Richie asks.

“Yeah.” He knows that Richie wants an explanation, but he’s giving Eddie space to volunteer information, instead of just expecting it of him. Another little nervous stab goes through him— _what does Richie want?_ —and he tries to breathe it away again. “I maybe freaked out a little.”

Richie’s fingers in Eddie’s hair hesitate, and his mouth twitches down for just a second. Then he resumes his circling. “Okay.”

“Not about—” Oh god, Richie’s going to think Eddie’s having second thoughts about him. He swallows. “I knew I would. Uh.”

He just needs to find a fucking noun and a verb. It’s not that hard. How could anything he says to Richie right now be worse than what he’s already admitted to today?

Richie said _I love you_ but he also said _I don’t date_ and he kind of admitted to sleeping with men but not recently and Eddie doesn’t really date either, to be fair, since what he does is apparently have a sexless marriage, and he’s not about to propose marriage to Richie right here, but he also has a medical ban on sex for the moment, and even if he didn’t, he is constantly on the verge of passing out. Part of the many reasons he dreaded sex with his wife, back when they were still having sex, was that it seemed like an awful lot of work and mess for little reward. Like—rock climbing. Except at the end of rock climbing you’re either at the top of the rocks or you get to coast down in your harness, and either way, you feel superhuman. Sex never made Eddie feel anything but awkward and stressed out and exhausted.

So it’s good that it’s not on the table right now, because Eddie already feels awkward and stressed out and exhausted. But for some reason he’s still kind of mad that it’s not on the table, because he feels like if he could meet Richie on his terms, that would be _something_. Not marriage and not dating but _something_ material to describe whatever the fuck it is they’re going to do going forward, more concrete than _I love you_. Eddie has been loving Richie for some time now, and the only difference is that now Richie knows, and they aren’t doing anything differently except for making out like teenagers and scalp massages.

And even if Eddie could describe it to someone—to some third party—which he can’t, because he can’t out Richie like that, no matter what his new lease on life and honesty with the self is—what would he say? _We’re in love._ Well, what the fuck is he supposed to do with that?

He does not know how to reconcile these disparate wants and needs and inclinations and limitations. And saying _of course I love you_ —doesn’t mean much, really. It’s a relief to be loved back—that was like taking a massive leap off a cliff and Richie being there to catch him, finally—but plenty of things can come after _of course I love you_.

_Of course I love you—but I don’t date. Of course I love you—but I don’t want to come out. Of course I love you; of course I love you; of course I love you—honey._

“I still love you,” Eddie says.

Richie flinches once, and then his face smooths out again. He keeps stroking across Eddie’s head, and he looks at Eddie with his wide black eyes soft and vulnerable again.

Eddie waits, lifting his eyebrows slightly.

Richie swallows, a slight click of his throat. “But,” he says, and stops.

He blinks. “But?”

“You said still,” Richie says, looking at him. His black slashing brows hitch up, like, _get to the point, Eds_.

“Yeah, I just—I hadn’t said it since I was in the hospital. So. I still. Yeah.”

Richie’s shoulders slump a little; his voice comes out breathless and relieved. “Oh, Jesus, I thought you were—never mind.”

“No,” Eddie says. He reaches up and grabs Richie’s wrist and holds him there. Richie’s arm feels heavy, somehow—warm and heavy, and he can feel the tapering ends of the muscles in Richie’s forearm under his fingers, the knot of bone at the end of the radius. “No, what did you think I was doing?”

“Hallucinating,” he says seriously. “Vividly.” He says that last the way he said _bumblebee_ , with the same taffy-pulling emphasis. It’s a joke, or he’s lying, or both.

“Rich.”

He looks around at Eddie and smiles, then splays his fingers wide and pulls his hand back, shaking him off with hardly any effort. “Thought you might be pulling the parachute cord, is all.” His crooked front tooth shows shiny and sharp.

“No,” Eddie says. He reaches for him again. “No. No, I’m not, Richie, don’t—” He grabs the side of his face, turns his head, wants to pull him close. Then he remembers his fucking sleep breath and hesitates.

“Okay,” Richie says. Some of his smile slips away, but Eddie can’t tell how much he believes him. His mouth is still slightly open, the corners turned down.

Eddie swallows. “I wasn’t kidding,” he says. “Or messing around, or—” He grimaces and averts his eyes. “I’ve been thinking about it.”

“Thinking about it,” Richie repeats, his intonation exactly the same as Eddie’s.

“Yeah.”

“Thinking about what?”

He pushes through the embarrassment like it’s pain, glares up at him, and snaps, “Thinking about jumping your bones, Rich, what the fuck do you think I was—?”

But Richie laughs, apparently cheered by Eddie’s temper. “No, no, tell me more, I wanna save this up. I can feed off the self-esteem from this for months.”

Eddie flicks him in the temple, just above the leg of his glasses. One of Richie’s eyes scrunches shut.

“You don’t have to coddle me,” Richie says, which is such a total reversal of how they’ve been arguing for the last several days that Eddie just stares at him. Richie leans down and kisses the top of his head. “You good now?”

“I’m not coddling you, dumbass,” Eddie replies. He swings his legs over the side of the couch and makes to stand up. “I have to go brush my teeth and take a shower, I’ll be back.” He stands and immediately grimaces. “Motherfucker.”

Richie, still sitting between couch and coffee table with his knees grasshopper-high up to his chest, makes an abortive movement as though to steady him, then catches himself and holds his hands splayed as though there’s a forcefield around Eddie’s legs. “You good?” he repeats, eyes big and worried again.

He definitely overdid it. And he’s due for another dose of painkillers—if it’s been four hours, they’re probably not effective anymore. But this isn’t the chest injury; this is his legs being sore from overdoing it. Just overexertion. This kind of pain would be reassuring, if it weren’t for how little exercise he actually accomplished.

He liked running, when he could get away with it back in New York. Myra didn’t have a problem with it, but she was concerned about him running into people on the street. Eddie can’t remember if she thought he was going to get mugged or just be a public nuisance, but she was always tense when she saw him going out to run, and always sighed when he came back home.

“Fine,” he says, and hobbles like a baby deer out to the bathroom.

* * *

He comes back later, clean, half-dressed, and wearing a towel around his shoulders like a shawl. Richie is in the kitchen, the smell of coffee soaking through the house but strongest here. Eddie watches him pour the hot water into the French press. It’s shaped like a beaker.

Eddie has a momentary flashback to chemistry class, to Richie trying to fit the goggles over his coke-bottle glasses and scowling. Petri dishes, little flashes of light that Richie couldn’t see bouncing around in the plastic and Eddie making jokes about gamma radiation. Before that—biology class, Richie sticking his hand in the fish tank to get a good cultivar of bacteria, pure delight on his face as Eddie shuddered and scrubbed his hands clean in the sink.

He swallows. He waits until Richie has set the kettle down, so there’s no chance of him spilling hot water if he’s startled. Then Eddie clears his throat, accidentally activates his cough reflex, and ends up clutching his chest while Richie turns around, no small amount of concern on his face.

He holds his towel shut over his ribs and wheezes, his diaphragm still spasming, “Well that didn’t go like I thought it would.”

“Good morning, sweet-smelling Spaghetti,” Richie says. He nods at Eddie’s towel. “The cloak is a good look for you.”

“I need a shirt,” Eddie says, which is why he bothered to come out in this state of undress at all. “And help with the bandage.” He stuck the one on the front of his chest just fine, but he’s hiding the one on his back under the towel.

“Yeah,” Richie says, blinking once and then twice behind his glasses. They’re no longer massive and magnifying. He looks simultaneously younger—with his damn hipster glasses—and like he’s forty trying to look younger, which makes him look older. The result is an oddly ageless adult Richie. Just a person Eddie has always known.

Eddie experiences the cognitive dissonance of Richie in overlay—1989 to 2016. And here they are, in a house together. Again. Still.

The tightness in his chest is too high to be from injury, too low to be psychosomatic asthma. It feels like someone’s squeezing his heart.

He runs his tongue over his teeth, satisfied by the smoothness, the taste of mint. He could push Richie back against the counter and kiss him now. Just hang onto him. He knots his fingers in the towel, vaguely anxious about cloth fibers again.

Richie abandons his coffee without comment to follow him back into the bathroom and put a bandage on his back. He outlines the adhesive edges with the same precision, faint pressure in a square along Eddie’s back as he runs a finger over them. Then Eddie—modesty towel back over his shoulders again—follows Richie back to his room in Ben’s house.

It’s a little smaller than Eddie’s, though this doesn’t surprise him. Eddie’s vaguely aware that Ben is giving him precedence, sort of, because Eddie’s injured. The fact that Richie is—well, not a _lot_ larger than Eddie, but significantly enough—and gets a smaller space kind of amuses him.

He hasn’t done a lot of moving in here, really. No stolen houseplants. Just his phone charger, hanging over the edge of the end table; and his empty suitcase, lid gaping open like a mouth, laying on the floor. He hasn’t made his bed. The sheets are twisted, the duvet hanging halfway to the floor. One pillow is up toward the head of the bed; the other is on the side, half-crushed, like Richie slept on top of it.

The want comes over him, heavy. It makes his skin prickle. He wants Richie on top of him, wants him big and heavy, and he thinks he’d ask for it—pull Richie down onto him on the couch, or maybe even on the bed if he were riding this wave of daring—if he didn’t have a sucking chest wound.

Richie pulls a wrinkled but clean shirt out of a laundry basket. Eddie doesn’t know when he did laundry, but he saw the washer and dryer downstairs when they were watching TV the other night.

“What are you wearing?” Richie asks, holding up watches and lizards.

Eddie almost rolls his eyes but holds his hand out for the lizards.

Richie grins wider as he hands it to him. “So that worked for you, huh?”

“Fuck off,” Eddie murmurs.

There is a long moment where Richie kind of looks at him, and Eddie holds the shirt in his left hand and keeps his towel shut with his right, and then at the same moment Richie realizes that Eddie’s not gonna get dressed in front of him, and Eddie realizes that it looks like he’s kicking Richie out of his own guest room.

“I’m gonna,” Eddie begins, and shuffles toward his own room.

“I—do you want bacon? Ben has, like, all this meat frozen in his fridge, but there’s bacon. There’s turkey bacon—he texted me about it, I don’t think he knew whether you would, uh, eat regular bacon. I can get it out, if you’d—” Richie blinks rapidly and moves toward the door.

They both pause in the act of egress, trying to let the other go first. The result is that they just stare at each other like idiots.

_Just drop your towel, Eds. Come on._

“Yeah,” Eddie says, holding tight to the edges of the towel.

Richie blinks again. “Yeah, you want bacon, or yeah, I should get out the turkey bacon?”

“I am so fucking hungry, dude,” Eddie says, voice coming out like a sigh that seems to boil all the way up from his feet. He doesn’t want to wait for turkey bacon to defrost. He feels as awkward as he did in the Toziers’ house back in Connecticut, when he told Richie not to let his parents cook for Eddie. But this is different. This isn’t Eddie infringing on people’s hospitality when all they really want is to see their son. This is Richie offering to be nice.

Eddie has never had a morning after, really. Never had a one-night stand. The closest thing he’s had is the first day of his marriage, after his wedding, when he couldn’t stand the idea of being caught still in bed and so got up at dawn and went to run, before the alarms were set for them to get up to leave for their honeymoon. When he came back, Myra was completely dressed and faintly flushed, and Eddie felt caught, but she looked at him and said, _Oh my god, the ceremony of the whole thing. It’s…_ She shook her head so hard it turned into a full-body shudder, and Eddie smiled at her, and they laughed because they felt understood in that moment. And then they got their bags and went to the airport, satisfied that they had a goal in mind and things to do.

Eddie hasn’t slept with Richie, but it feels a little bit like he has. The aching vulnerability of it, the shifting around trying to figure out where they stand. The fucking want of it all. He needs to eat so that he can take another dose of painkillers, but he wants that goddamn bacon, and he would eat the turkey bacon too if he could, and his discharge papers included a whole section on nutrition with meal plans, and at the moment he feels like he could choke down a buffet for a young men’s basketball team and still get up for another plate.

Eddie has never eaten at a buffet. They’re terribly unhygienic, all that food exposed under hot plates, for hours.

“I mean—I can do eggs?” Richie says. “Eggs and bacon? Toast? There’s, like, a _worrying_ amount of meat in the freezer, I feel like Ben’s been hiding bodies and turning them into sausage links and that’s why he was so down to come to Derry and kill a few monsters, he’s had some practice.”

Faced with Richie’s suggestion that the bacon he’s about to feed Eddie might be made of human, Eddie stares at him with something like revulsion. “What, are you suggesting Ben’s a serial killer?”

“No, I’m just saying, he’s got the cabin in the woods, he’s got a lot of frozen meat—there’s a whole meat freezer in the garage, he showed me, it’s fucking crazy, all this butcher paper and for some reason a bag of scallops, weirdo.”

“Are you suggesting that the scallops were people?” Eddie asks dryly.

“No, I’m suggesting that Ben Hanscom has an illustrious career as a monster hunter, and that’s why his buildings are so creepy,” Richie says. “He’s built a goddamn panopticon here.”

Eddie has only the vaguest grasp on the concept of the panopticon. “This is not a panopticon,” he says.

“But are you sure?”

“Yes—the panopticon is a jail. This is a house.”

“Yeah, but the panopticon has, like—” Richie scrunches one eye shut and holds a fist over the other lens, like he’s using a telescope. “—the control center, and everybody watching—”

“—and everybody else in the panopticon can’t leave,” Eddie says. “You can’t just say something’s a panopticon when it’s not a panopticon.”

Richie lowers his hands and gives Eddie a wide-eyed sidelong look. _“I’m always watching,”_ he croaks as he slinks out of the room.

“I don’t know that reference,” Eddie calls after him.

* * *

Walking down the hallway feels weird, and Eddie can’t figure out why until he realizes that he’s trying not to put weight on his feet. It’s going very poorly. He relaxes and deals with the ache he feels from the knees down—he’s forty, this is just part of life now, the more he walks the better he’ll get—and walks back to the kitchen, glad Richie didn’t see his horror-movie spider-creep.

The house smells like breakfast. Not breakfast the way that Eddie has eaten it for most of his life, but how breakfast is supposed to smell. It’s closer to one in the afternoon now, and Eddie hears a skillet sizzling as he crosses through the little study. The blinds are pulled back, the sun is coming in clear and white through the glass, and Eddie feels like thirty years have passed since he got up for his walk this morning.

He has to use the incentive spirometer, has to do his coughing exercises, has to stretch his arms over his head. Has to get better. But first there’s food.

Richie is standing with his head crooked at what looks like a painful angle to peer into a frying pan. He’s not too big for Ben’s kitchen, but he’s standing like he’s too big for Ben’s kitchen. Standing like he’s a giant, with his shoulders hunched as though pressed up against the ceiling, and he’s frying bacon like there’s no tomorrow. There’s a plate on the counter next to him, layers of paper towels stacked on top of each other, brown crisps of bacon like insulation between them. He wears an expression of intense concentration, his eyebrows flat behind the upper boundaries of his lenses, and he holds a coffee mug in his left hand. The press, on the counter next to the sink, still has grounds squashed to the bottom under the filter. Richie keeps sipping from the mug almost absentmindedly, glaring directly down into the frying pan.

When Eddie creeps through the little divide that separates the kitchen from the rest of the house, Richie looks up, expression brightening. “Hey,” he says. He glances down at his plate of bacon. “I don’t know how crispy you like it, so I’ve got, like, a sliding scale here of—” He lifts up the corner of one of the paper towels to show that there is a gradation of how well-done the bacon is between levels. Probably happened naturally as the frying pan heated up.

He walks closer to see, as Richie displays what looks like most of a pack of bacon to him. Eddie’s stomach is shrunken. He can eat bacon continuously for days, based on what Richie’s already cooked here, and there’s more still frying in the pan. The plastic packet tells him that it’s _thick-cut applewood-smoked bacon_. Eddie doesn’t know if there’s a flavor difference between applewood and other woods.

He reaches over and takes the coffee mug out of Richie’s hands. Richie’s eyebrows shoot up, but he doesn’t resist, loosening his fingers so Eddie can hold the cup. It’s very hot. Eddie’s surprised—how can Richie be drinking out of this without burning himself? He sets it on the counter.

“I maybe went overboard with the bacon,” Richie admits, staring down at the abandoned mug with the whites showing around his eyes, like a spooked horse.

Eddie reaches out and grabs hold of the hem of Richie’s dumb yacht shirt in one hand, making a fist in the fabric. He can feel the waistband of Richie’s pajama pants, the drawstring tight in its loop of flannel. When Eddie looks up Richie is looking down at him, expression apprehensive. Why?

“You okay?” Eddie asks him.

Richie blinks. “Yeah,” he says.

“Okay,” he says, and leans up to kiss him again.

The way Richie leans in immediately is reassuring. Eddie kisses him carefully at first, trying to coax him, and Richie’s mouth is hot, Richie’s body is hot. The frying pan sizzles behind them. There’s a lurch in Eddie’s gut, a tug kind of like hunger. Eddie thinks deliriously _I’m going to bite him_ but he doesn’t, just sucks hard at his lower lip. He scores him carefully with his teeth. He wants to see Richie’s lips swell again.

“Okay—okay.”

Richie slides his hands under Eddie’s jaw, fingers touching the hinges at the back. Eddie feels an ache behind his molars, remembers how it felt to bite down on his own fingers. He leans in harder—wants to make Richie push back harder, wants to make Richie crush his lips against his teeth, wants to feel it. He slides his fingers up the back of Richie’s shirt, feels the line of flannel suddenly drop off into Richie’s skin, and Richie pushes forward into Eddie with a gasp between their mouths.

Eddie breaks the kiss to check on him. Richie’s eyes are shut and when he opens them to look back he looks almost dazed.

“Can I?” Eddie asks quietly.

Richie nods and ducks his head to keep kissing again. He pulls back only briefly and there’s a soft noise as their lips disconnect. “Literally whatever you want,” he says. He smells like coffee. He tastes like coffee. Eddie has never liked coffee before this. He still doesn’t. He likes Richie.

His back is hard along his spine, and he’s soft on either side. Richie has love handles. Eddie hates the term. He fucking loves touching them though—sinks his fingers into Richie’s skin and squeezes, feels Richie gasp again. Then he bites Eddie’s lip. Hard thin edge of pain. Mental flash of Richie’s crooked tooth. Eddie’s whole body jerks forward. His skin prickles, jaw to throat to collarbone. Maybe Richie would kiss him there. Scrape his stubble there. Bite him again.

Richie slides his tongue across the spot where he bit, then rests his forehead on Eddie’s. Surprised they’re no longer kissing, Eddie tries to relax his claws on Richie’s back. His skin is hot and there’s a faint human dampness to it, like Eddie’s fingertips might stick to him. There’s sparse hair there, very fine, and Eddie rubs his thumbs across Richie’s sides. He feels a bump. Maybe a mole, or a pimple, or an ingrown hair or something. He likes that Richie is textured; has thought very little about other men’s body hair in his life, but he’s happy with what he finds.

“You okay?” Eddie asks again.

“Uh—yeah, I mean, if back fat’s what gets you off—”

“Shut up,” he says, and kisses him again.

The idea of getting off embarrasses him a little—at least, Richie speaking the words into the air between them. He feels—hot, but not hard. He wants things, but they feel stupid. Not connected to his dick, anyway. He wants Richie’s skin pressed up against his, and he wants _touch_ , but it all feels kind of aimless. He wants it the same way he wanted to rub his feet across the soft blanket, just because it felt good.

Then Richie lifts his head and turns back to the stove abruptly, turning the dial and moving the frying pan off the burner while Eddie’s still hanging off him. “Sorry. Sorry, I just—I’m gonna burn the fucking house down, and then Ben will be really nice about it, and it’ll be the worst thing in the fucking world.”

It takes Eddie long moments to understand what the feeling he’s experiencing is. He releases Richie and pulls his hands out of his shirt, wanting to shake his head at himself for being ridiculous, and has to lean with his head on the yacht on Richie’s chest for long moments.

“I don’t think he’d be that nice about it,” he says, practically into Richie’s sternum. “I think even Ben has his limits.”

“Yeah, I’m worried he doesn’t, and that’s what scares me,” Richie says. Eddie feels the way his arms hover as he tries to work out whether to put his hands on Eddie, and if so, where. Eventually Richie settles and pushes his fingers up the nape of Eddie’s neck and into his hair. “You’re so fucking fluffy, it’s so cute, what the fuck?” He sounds half angry about it. “What are you doing?”

“I don’t know,” Eddie answers.

“Okay—well, the boat is not actually an invitation to motorboat me—”

Eddie doesn’t know what happens, but the next thing he knows his eyes are burning and overflowing and he’s laughing into Richie’s chest, so high and hysterical he can’t get his breath back, and he holds his own ribs to try and keep himself together. It doesn’t work.

“Are you—are you crying?” Richie asks, sounding slightly terrified at the prospect.

“I’m laughing,” Eddie gasps.

“Okay,” he says doubtfully. There’s a pause and then he gingerly pats the back of Eddie’s neck, big hand thudding into the top of Eddie’s spinal column. “Did you want to eat?” he asks almost plaintively.

Eddie looks up at him. Richie’s lips are always fuller than Eddie’s—not distractingly full, but Eddie looks anyway—and they’re as swollen as he wanted. There’s a red flush just under his bottom lip where Eddie got sloppy.

“Yes,” he says stupidly, wiping at his eyes. The influx of _feeling_ is alarming. He’s shaking a little. He kind of hopes it’s just from low blood sugar.

He gets a plate down from Ben’s cabinet and inspects the heap of bacon. The layers toward the top are crispier, the ones toward the bottom—presumably cooked while the pan was heating—are less. Richie turns while Eddie’s eyeing his choices and begins dropping more bacon onto the paper towel, and these strips are very dark.

“Is that edible?” Eddie asks.

“Huh? Oh, yeah.” Richie sets the frying pan down, picks up a strip, and bites into it. It cracks and he drops the remaining piece onto the plate, rubbing his fingers together. “Hot,” he says, mouth full. “Totally edible, though.”

“Did you just burn yourself?”

Richie tilts his head back and exhales through his open mouth. “Little bit. _Hahhh. Hahhh._ ”

“Oh my god.”

He sits down at one of the two barstools on the island countertop and watches Richie cook, selecting likely-looking strips of bacon for his new gastronomic adventure. It seems like a good place to start, foodwise. Breakfast, most important meal of the day, being had around one in the afternoon. Second breakfast, actually, since he ate fruit earlier. Brunch? He’s supposed to have protein and calories, and he’s pretty sure bacon provides both.

Then Richie makes eggs. Eddie’s not sure how long he’ll keep cooking if he just lets him, but he doesn’t necessarily feel a need to stop him. He’s still considering what he wants to say.

Earlier Eddie said _I still love you_ and Richie started bracing himself for a blow. So does that mean that no matter what Eddie says, he’s gonna expect a _but_? And does Eddie have the energy to work around that?

Because Eddie comes with a lot of caveats, just as a person. As a partner—forget about it.

Richie turns to show him a fried egg resting on a spatula. Eddie looks at its shiny surface. The yolk is perfectly intact, the white cooked up like a skirt around it. The edges are brown and crisped.

Just in the center of the egg, that nucleus where the yolk connects with the white, there’s a clear liquid. A sheen. Where it isn’t cooked all the way through.

Eddie swallows down bacon, lean and cooked long enough that it shatters in his teeth. He likes that. His fear of trichinosis feels mostly appeased by Richie trying to cook it over the fires of hell. His fear of salmonella will probably only be cured by the complete restructuring of the United States poultry farming industry.

“I’m not ready for that, man,” he admits, staring at the gooey surface.

The corners of Richie’s mouth twitch up as he tries to hold a straight face. “Well it’s a little late to scramble it. I will take this bullet for you.” He turns and drops the egg back into the frying pan and some of the wetness sizzles.

Eddie’s brain whooshes forward into the worst-case scenario and he realizes, with resignation, that they’re gonna eat food, and then Eddie’s gonna put his mouth on Richie’s mouth, and while he knows that sugar stays in people’s mouths after they eat, he doesn’t know about salmonella. But why wouldn’t salmonella? Can Eddie catch salmonella from making out with Richie?

He had biscuits and gravy at the diner in Connecticut. The biscuit, a vegetarian sausage patty, a grilled tomato, a fried egg, and white pepper gravy. Homefries tucked to the side, no maple syrup, _thank you, Richie_. When he cut a bite out the egg drooled buttery onto the plate. White gravy flecked with black and golden yolk and red tomato. The diner was all paneled in faintly green wood, and Richie was big and grinning on the other side of the table, keeping up a ramble about e-readers and Bill’s books and his potential secret second career as a romance novelist, and Eddie felt _good_. When he put the food in his mouth he thought of nothing except _heat_ , the way that drinking coffee or tea or hot chocolate makes you think of the warmth of human companionship.

He watches Richie drink coffee.

“Maybe toast,” he suggests, thinking of calories, of butter melting over hot bread. Not the true yellow of eggs, but pale yellow fading into white. When you cut a slice of butter from a stick, the way the very edge of the square seems clearer, somehow. And how when the butter melts on toast it turns brighter yellow, warmer. Golden-brown toast, glistening.

Richie turns toward the toaster without further prompting. “Ben didn’t have bread, man. He’s out here living a carbless life. I don’t even know what to do with that.”

“He doesn’t eat pizza,” Eddie reminds him, so he doesn’t have to think about how Ben bought bread just for him and Richie to eat, in his house, while they’re gone.

“I know they say you are what you eat, but—”

“I can’t have sex,” Eddie blurts out before he loses his nerve.

Richie’s shoulders jump up like he’s startled. Eddie watches the back of his head. His hair’s curlier there, especially toward the nape of his neck. He likes the strain of his shoulders against the back of the shirt. It hugs tight, almost wing-like down his trapezius, and then relaxes and slouches away.

Richie puts one hand on the countertop and then turns slightly. “Did I hear you right?” he asks, half disbelieving, half incredulous. He’s grinning like Eddie just announced he’s won the lottery, which is completely at odds with the reaction this declaration deserves.

Eddie feels prickling across his cheekbones and the bridge of his nose. He knows he’s flushed; he looks down at the cooling strips of bacon just so he doesn’t have to see Richie’s face, his shining teeth.

“Medically,” he says. “For three weeks. Because I’m not allowed to sweat. And.” He wants to scratch self-consciously at his hair, at the back of his head, but instead he curls his hands into fists.

He wants to admit to his lifelong indifference towards sex, and how weird it is that, after a traumatic injury that means he _can’t_ have sex, he’s thinking about it maybe more than he ever has in his life. That he can remember, anyway. His memories of puberty are kind of shaded in a stretch of panic relating to his body; he remembers ferocious masturbation but more the nervousness about possibly getting caught, the revulsion of cleaning up after himself, guilt and impatience tending towards tears because he didn’t understand why he couldn’t stop doing it, but he remembers very little of the urgency that drove him toward it. Almost no sensation at all.

And now everything he’s thinking about is _tangentially_ related to sex, maybe, he guesses. He wanted Richie to kiss him on the way back from the hospital. He wants to be close. He wants Richie’s skin, Richie’s weight pressed up against him. He wants to be _under_ him and he’s not oblivious to _suggestion_ , to _suggestiveness_ , it’s that his brain doesn’t take him to the natural conclusions.

Or his body. Frankly he doesn’t know if he has enough blood right now to spare any toward an erection.

Instead of voicing all of this, he gestures in the general vicinity of his gaping chest wound.

Richie says, voice practically _quivering_ with interest, _“Eddie.”_

He covers his face with his hands. “Jesus Christ, you are a nightmare person.”

“ _Eddie_. Look at me.”

“No. Fuck you.”

His voice is soft and wheedling. _“Eddie.”_

He peers through his fingers.

Richie has turned around, breakfast forgotten, and is leaning down slightly to try to get a look at him through his little shield. He is open-mouthed as he stares at Eddie, and Eddie again experiences the overlay—Richie at forty, making him breakfast in Ben’s house; Richie at maybe thirteen, urging him to say something else embarrassing, just for his starving curiosity, just so that he’d be able to make fun of it. He’s pretty sure that eighth grade was when he learned to yell _I plead the Fifth!_ when Richie said _what did you just say?_ and got that look on his face.

“Did you _ask_?” Richie says. “Tell me you asked. Please, _please_ tell me you asked. Tell me you were literally coming back to life in the hospital and you were so hard-up you asked a surgeon for medical clearance to fuck, please, _tell_ me that’s how it went.”

Eddie experiences an urge to whip a plate at him and has no idea where that came from, but it’s tied with the urge to lunge basically on top of Richie. If they were swimming, Eddie thinks he’d try to drown him right about now, just to teach him a lesson, or maybe just to get him back for it.

 _Oh,_ he thinks with startling clarity, realizing that a lot of his instinct to physically attack Richie is sublimated from other instincts. Instincts that don’t seem to care much whether he’s in adequate physical condition to wrestle Richie to the floor, or when the last time Ben mopped in here was. _Oh._

“I didn’t ask!” he snaps. “The doctor told me as part of my discharge papers.”

Richie snorts. “Discharge.”

Eddie gags a little. He can’t believe he’s so into this man. “I’m pretty sure I have it written down somewhere. And.” He’s trying to push past Richie’s transparent glee. “I’m not divorced yet.”

Richie’s eyebrows hike up. “And you’re saving your virginity for—”

Eddie reaches for a convenient nearby projectile and finds a stack of napkins. He wings these at Richie and they flutter uselessly around the kitchen, but it’s better than wasting bacon—even if his stomach is starting to reach capacity. Unless that’s just general anxiety telling him he’s not hungry anymore.

“No, no, no, we’re not going there,” Eddie says, as Richie cackles and bats napkins away. “I just mean—”

He’s trying to find the line of moderation. Somewhere between the wild sex in a love nest in upstate New York that would be happening in some other, better world, and leaping immediately to marriage and commitment. Because Richie said he doesn’t date. And even if he dated—he hasn’t said anything at all about coming out, and Eddie’s new lease on life isn’t going to lead him straight over those tripwires Richie seems to have set up all along his boundaries. He’s not gonna ask Richie to come out, and he’s trying to put his own limitations on the table first.

“—like, that’s done, I told her that we’re done, I’m going to. Well.” _See other people_ sounds disingenuous, because Eddie’s past experience leads him to believe that he’s terrifically bad at _seeing_ people, but hanging out with Richie has never been difficult. Except in the ways that Richie can be a difficult person, but that’s different.

Richie seems to remember the fire hazard in the room and begins sliding his fried eggs onto a plate. They’re no longer quite as jelly-like. Eddie can’t decide if he finds eggs over hard any more appealing than eggs over easy, but also he’s definitely not emotionally equipped to do that kind of experimenting today. He’s admitting sexual inadequacy; he’s not ready to cope with eggs.

“Going to what?” Richie asks, eyebrows raised. “Since, medically speaking, sex is off the table.”

Eddie rolls his eyes. After Richie’s reaction to the perfectly reasonable medical restriction, he’s not going to admit that he wasn’t having much sex in his marriage either. Unless he’s already admitted to Richie how long it’s been. He doesn’t think so, though. He’s aware that painkillers have left him with certain gaps in his memory, particularly immediately following surgery, but the nice thing about Richie is that he won’t leave you in suspense about whether you’ve admitted something mortifying; he’ll remind you of it every day forever.

“I just want to be with you, is all,” Eddie says, shoving his plate forward to indicate he’s done and folding his arms as best he can. “I can’t have sex, and I’m getting a divorce, but I want to be with you.”

Richie, shoulders and arms looking impossibly big as he shuffles around the kitchen, looks at Eddie sidelong. “What’s that mean?”

Something in Eddie’s chest squirms under the scrutiny. “What do you mean, _what’s it mean_?” He feels rejected, which is absurd because Richie told him this morning that he loves him.

But then Eddie said _I still love you_ and Richie didn’t say it back, so he feels a little bit like Richie’s left him hanging. Maybe just a little.

“It means, what’s it mean?” Richie asks, shrugging. He blinks slowly and looks down at his own hands; Eddie watches him reach for the bread.

“I’m full,” he says. “Don’t worry about me.”

“Okay.”

Eddie watches the flicks of his fingers as he separates two slices of bread from the loaf and places them in the toaster, pushes the lever down. There’s something elegant about the motions instead of slapdash. While Eddie’s known him Richie has gone from cute to awkward to gawky to this.

“I love you,” he says to Richie’s back.

The words fall, very lonely, into the space between them in this narrow segmented room.

Richie turns around, his eyebrows raised and his expression apprehensive. He crosses the room quickly—Eddie’s almost startled, in fact, by how fast he can move when he wants to. He comes around the island counter and bangs his hip. Abruptly knocked off course, he seems to spin in the space next to the window, cursing, but then he’s all around the back of Eddie’s barstool.

“Hey. Hey, it’s okay.” Then Richie’s wrapping his arms around him, high up on his shoulders so he doesn’t touch Eddie’s sutures. There’s pressure on top of his head—Richie pushing his face into his hair. “I didn’t mean—” He cuts himself off and holds onto him, something almost frantic in the way that he kisses the top of Eddie’s head. “Hey, I got you. I love you, I do, I mean it. I love you.” He sways in place a little.

One moment Eddie feels comforted, and then he can’t breathe. He takes a hitching gulp of air and immediately Richie lets him go.

“Sorry. Sorry,” he says. He wipes his hands on his flannel pajama pants, like they’re sweaty. “Sorry, I’m just. A fuck-up, I don’t know.”

Eddie grabs hold of the hem of Richie’s shirt and hangs onto him. He pushes his cheek—the one with the slowly-scarring stab wound—into the dumb printed yacht and then just feels Richie breathing.

“I hate this shirt,” he mumbles.

Richie tugs at the collar of the lizard shirt. “This shirt?”

“No.” He tugs at Richie’s pajama shirt. “This shirt.”

“We can go clothes shopping.”

He closes his eyes. “I like wearing your shirts,” he admits.

When Richie speaks again, Eddie can hear the grin in his voice. “I know.”

“Oh, fuck off, Han Solo.” He shoves in the vicinity of Richie’s navel, but doesn’t actually want to put distance between them.

Richie laughs. Eddie can hear the echo in his chest. “Not what I meant, but by all means, compare me to Harrison Ford.” This time Eddie flicks him just under his belly button and Richie gives a full-body flinch. “Ouch. Don’t like that.”

“Sorry.”

“But yeah, you were real cute back in the hotel, telling Stan thanks but no thanks, _I’m sure I have something in my suitcase_.” He pitches his voice down slightly to do his impression of Eddie, speaking more into the front of his mouth.

Eddie’s forty years old; he’s not cute. But he is pretty happy, cuddled up to Richie like this. It’s kind of dumb. But it feels good.

“If you tell me what you want, I’ll do it,” Richie says in his own voice. Half a laugh in it too, but not like he’s making fun of Eddie; more like he’s fighting down hysteria. “Literally anything you want. If you’ve got some weird shit to work out, I’m your guy.”

_Stupid idea. I’m all in._

“I don’t want to— _work shit out_ on you,” Eddie says. “I love you. I just want.” He doesn’t know how to articulate it—how to say the words in a way that doesn’t sound stupid—so he just tugs Richie half a step forward until he’s leaning up against the counter again. He feels off to the side, looking for the place where Richie banged his hip, and finds it when Richie hisses. “Sorry.”

“You all right?” Richie asks.

“Shouldn’t I be asking you that?”

“Yeah, you got hole-punched by Bonzo the child killer, but it’s really my boo-boo we should be worried about.”

“Hole-punched,” Eddie snorts.

“I’m glad you think that’s funny instead of just punching me in the testicles,” Richie says.

“I’m medically banned from punching you in the testicles.”

 _“Shit.”_ Richie buckles onto the countertop, his forearm sliding down between his legs as though shielding himself. “That’s funnier than anything I’ve ever said on stage.”

“Hire me. I need the health insurance.”

“I’ve never met a writer with health insurance,” Richie says. “Bill is leading a very dangerous life.” His thumb runs across Eddie’s head, and Eddie hears the rustles of his own hair. “You’re so fluffy.”

Eddie is also painfully in love with Richie’s curls.

“I just think we should be a unit,” he says. “I think we should come as a package deal.”

“Pretty sure you’re medically banned from that too.”

“I have changed my mind about punching you in the testicles.”

Richie laughs a little, coming out of his defensive crouch and half leaning into Eddie in turn. “Are you asking me out?”

He’s pretty sure that this isn’t Richie getting ready to reject him. He’d probably pull away a little bit at first, anyway.

“Yes,” Eddie says, remembering Richie in the hospital saying _I don’t date_.

Richie sways a little in place again, this time almost mocking. Eddie isn’t sure what it reminds him of—and then he remembers a school dance, ages ago, and watching Bill awkwardly sway with a blond girl who asked him to slow dance with her. He almost knows what Richie’s gonna say before he says it.

“Yeah, we can go steady, Eddie.” He sounds pleased at the rhyme, which is _so Richie_.

If he took Richie’s hand in his and pivoted them around in a circle, that’s what this would feel like. Close, the odd space between intimacy and darkness and bright light and scrutiny.

He doesn’t ask Richie about their friends, about when Ben and Bev come back, about when Eddie has to go back to the hospital. He’s just got to try to let himself have this. Little by little by little, in this space between spaces. No work, no justifications, nobody watching them; and the solemn knowledge that Richie is his, after all this time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Not gonna lie, I've been dying to write the "I can't have sex"/"Did you _ASK?!_ interaction for some time now and I'm glad I crammed it into this chapter. Since we've spent the last 3 chapters or so on the longest day of Eddie's life, I promise things will pick up next chapter.
> 
> In the meantime, I've been streaming [Zoe Amira's "Views for a Vision" video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bCgLa25fDHM). If you're poor and sick like me--here's how to do something right now.


	16. That Highbrow Shit

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Eddie talks. So does Richie, under duress, but do they actually say anything?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey, sorry this took such a long time to get out, I added an extra 12 pages to the end to make up for it.
> 
> Content warnings for this chapter: the big ones are 1) Eddie removes his face stitches himself this chapter, and some of the description plays a little into trypophobia imagery! Sorry about that. They're dissolving stitches, so there's no blood, but Eddie's very uncomfortable and Richie gets anxious about it.  
> 2) Richie and Eddie have a conversation about sexuality, compulsory heterosexuality, and internalized homophobia. Some of the things Richie says are a little biphobic/have biphobic implications re: ignoring attraction to men and "passing" as straight. This does not reflect the view of the author, I just do not think that this 40 year old closeted dude is super woke or has thought critically about his sexuality in a healthy way.  
> 3) In that conversation, Richie speaks openly and flippantly about his lifelong fear about being a victim of a hate crime and possibly murdered. You know. Like just happened in Derry.
> 
> Other smaller ones: memories of Munchausen's syndrome-by proxy, Eddie is still on pain medication and it's causing him to dissociate a little bit and also to act pretty fucking high, mention of suicide (not Stan this time!), Eddie initiates kissing while drugged, mention of cruelty to animals, the problematic nature of Richie's stage persona is deep and absorbing despite Eddie's urge to defend him, mention of the Native American genocide, Eddie does not understand the arts, the Losers gotta stop making Mike do emotional labor, sudden surprising sexual thoughts, reference to alcoholism (Ben), Richie makes a sex joke in a fucking weird context and Eddie shuts him down immediately, discussion of Eddie's injury and nerve damage, discussion of vomiting, discussion of leprosy/Hansen's disease, Eddie doesn't know what furries are, complicated gay feelings about religion, Eddie calls Richie a bitch, some of Eddie's germaphobic behaviors meet the criteria for compulsions.
> 
> PLEASE read those carefully, because most of those things happen in a blink-and-you'll-miss-it kind of way, but I know there are a lot of them in that wall of text and I don't want to startle anyone if there's something specific you're looking out for. As always, please tell me if there's something you'd like me to add to the tags/tag for in the future.

Now that he remembers his missing childhood, Eddie is able to remember that he has never been a good patient. Maybe he thought he was, in that muddy interregnum between forgetting and Sonia telling him what he was—those years when he learned to swallow the frustration and impotent rage that came from being told to go back to bed, from having soup and tea brought to him on a tray in his room, from the quilts piled onto him. He was not sick, and he still allowed himself to be a patient, and maybe that was what being a good patient was. He didn’t have a healthy respect for medical advice—he had a dependence on it, because these were the people who knew what he should be doing with his body. They went to school for it. Eddie, hapless alien divorced from his own flesh, fed himself on their guidance.

He remembers it all of a sudden when he pulls back the blankets on his bed in Ben’s guest room—Ben told him to take the master suite if it’s more comfortable but he feels weird about that, despite using the master bath at least twice a day—and the hot damp smell of his body hits him in the face. Suddenly he’s not in Ben’s light and comforting little room with the stolen spider plant on the dresser—he’s in his childhood bedroom, the curtains pulled over the window, and the summer heat makes everything look and feel dark red and clammy. And then it goes.

Eddie stands there, bewildered, for several long moments, wondering if that was a flashback and why he’s suddenly in a state of mind to be having flashbacks, before he resolves to go rinse the sweat off his body before his morning walk.

He smells coffee as soon as he walks into the hallway, which tells him that Richie is up. He uses the shower quickly, sitting on the cold stone bench and hosing himself off with the detachable showerhead, and then dresses in the shorts and hoodie from Ben’s wardrobe.

Part of him is thinking, with some pleasure at the new reality of having friends of his own, that he will have to get Ben a very nice Christmas gift this year. It’s something to look forward to.

He comes out almost shivering and finds Richie in the kitchen. Richie is half-slumped over the island counter, chin propped on his hand, and gives Eddie a little salute when he sees him appear around the wall. He is not wearing the yacht shirt, but he is wearing a too-tight gray t-shirt. It pulls across his chest despite his slouch.

“What are you doing?” Eddie asks, because they just had the conversation about what is and is not a panopticon.

“Moral support,” Richie replies, sleepy-voiced.

The wave of affection this fills Eddie with is unprecedented and unexpected.

“I don’t understand your relationship to caffeine,” he says. He walks across the kitchen and up next to him to plant a kiss on top of his head. Richie’s hair smells good—unwashed, but good. Human bodies are oily nightmares, but at least he’s attracted to Richie’s oil. He takes a deep breath, trying to be subtle about sniffing him, before pulling away.

Richie has moved his hand to just below his nose so it covers his mouth when he talks. “Oh, it’s long, complicated, very sexual. Don’t be jealous, baby.” Eddie gives him a quizzical look, trying to ignore the sensation of tingling coming from the pet name. “No?”

“Are you hiding?” Eddie asks, and flicks idly at the palm of Richie’s hand, the way his pinkie finger hangs down.

“I didn’t brush my teeth,” Richie says.

Eddie snorts a little. “Gross.” He pulls Richie’s hand away and pins it on the counter, then kisses him anyway. Richie’s shoulders hike up when he does this, and he doesn’t try to make it any more than a close-mouthed peck. In the face of Richie’s obvious discomfort Eddie takes a step back, feeling uncertain.

Richie is staring at him now, eyes much more alert, his brows lifted in something like surprise.

“What?” Eddie asks, wondering if he’s made a serious misstep.

But Richie only grins a little, the corner of his mouth curling up. Eddie knows this face—that old _I know something you don’t know_ from exchanging high school gossip at the lunch table.

“Nothing,” he lies transparently, and raises his coffee cup as though to forestall further interrogation.

“What?” Eddie repeats, just as demanding as he was at fourteen, fifteen, sixteen. Richie half-sways in his chair, turning his refusal into a tease. Eddie scowls at him even as the affection lances through him.

_“Nothing,”_ he repeats more emphatically, grinning wider.

Eddie goes out to do his half-hour walk without any satisfactory answers. As he picks his way down the porch steps, carefully braced on the safety rail, he hears the mechanical whir of the blinds rolling out of the way. His right hand has trouble separating fingers—like he’s seven years old and Bill Denbrough is teaching him how to do the _live long and prosper_ sign again—so he has to flip Richie off with his left. He hears no answering laughter, but he’s sure Richie sees it.

Walking shouldn’t be difficult. It sucks that walking is difficult; it has never been difficult for him before, and he’s not enthusiastic about these new limitations. He remembers medical advice for exercise—that when you run, if you exert yourself properly, you should not be able to talk; and that if you walk for exercise, you should be able to talk but not sing.

He doesn’t get lightheaded—that would be the signal for him to stop and sit down at his earliest convenience—but he feels his reduced lung capacity now. Feels his chest expand, feels his throat burn. He tries to keep good posture, thrusting out his chest, not getting too exerted. (After he overdid it and woke up with calves as hard as rocks, he happened to glance back through his discharge papers and see _DON’T OVERDO IT_ in all caps.)

Instead he focuses on each step, placing his heel just so, rolling forward onto the ball of his feet. This has the added benefit of stretching his calves. He feels weirdly present, the way that everyone always told him meditation was supposed to feel, but he was never able to brush his racing thoughts to the side. This, though—this feels good. It’s nice to be in his body. Nice to feel the exertion, feel himself reaching for the upper limit and pressing against it, certain that sooner or later, it will break, but he won’t.

* * *

It feels like—for he doesn’t know how long—there’s been some kind of membrane between Eddie and the rest of the world. He doesn’t know whether everyone feels like this all of the time, or whether this is a direct result of Sonia Kaspbrak’s parenting, or whether he built this wall up over time to stop the big bad frightening outside from touching him. But it feels thinner somehow. Translucent, maybe.

Honestly the opioid painkillers probably have something to do with that.

Eddie not only has never cooked for himself in his life, he has been actively forbidden from cooking for himself. Maybe not in so many words, but Myra’s panic and tears got the same result as actually banning him from the kitchen. Richie, on the other hand, subsists on take-out and the LA restaurant scene, with some overlap thereof. He can make breakfast food—and secretly Eddie is somewhat jealous, watching him make pancakes, wondering if _I don’t date_ has the corollary _but I do make the guy breakfast in the morning_ and that’s why everything he feeds Eddie is so fucking good. But other than that, they’re limited to boxes of food with instructions on the side.

“Hey, buddy, whatcha doing?” Richie asks, when he catches Eddie staring into a slowly boiling pot of water as though it holds the meaning of life.

Eddie is not sure how long he’s been standing there. He was watching the bubbles—the small ones forming on the inside of the pot, and then slightly larger, floating across the surface of the water in skidding diagonals like dragonflies, and then burbling up and bursting and turning to a true rolling boil. They say a watched pot never boils. It isn’t true. Eddie has just discovered that the secret is to have patience for every stage, to accept it as it is, instead of tapping his foot and demanding that the world be the way he wants it immediately.

Honestly, the opioid painkillers _definitely_ have something to do with that. He can achieve certain zen-like qualities when he’s exhausted on his morning walks, but only chemical influence can get him to stand still and feel happy instead of antsy about it. He keeps finding himself in odd places around Ben’s house, remembering every moment of how long he’s been there but having lost his sense of time. It’s like he’s subconsciously trying to become part of the furniture.

Richie turns him carefully by the shoulders and almost casually slings an arm around him. The next thing Eddie knows he’s looking up into his face as Richie places a thumb just below Eddie’s eyebrow and tugs to raise his eyelid a little. Then the corners of his mouth twitch.

“God, your eyes are like fucking saucers,” he says. He doesn’t sound displeased by this assessment, just amused.

Something too mild to qualify as true irritation moves below the surface of Eddie’s brain. He thinks of whales, seeming black under the water, swimming up just shy of breaching the surface.

“I’m thinking about whales,” Eddie reports, to explain why he’s standing in the kitchen like an inconveniently-placed floor lamp while Richie tries to make tortellini.

Richie’s mouth twitches again—short smile, quickly hidden. “Yeah? What about them?”

Eddie is aware that Richie finds his behavior funny. But Richie always thinks whatever he does is funny. He thinks it’s funny when Eddie’s ranting, and funny when Eddie’s happy about something Richie thinks is boring, and funny when Eddie is spitting mad. He can’t complain about Richie not taking him seriously, because he doesn’t know if their friendship has room for Richie to take him seriously.

He tilts his head to the side to dislodge Richie’s inspecting touch, and then leans heavier into his chest. Richie stiffens immediately—he’s leery about touching Eddie’s torso, afraid of hurting him—and that means Eddie detects real irritation on his sonar. He’s thinking about Richie being annoying as kids, literally wrestling him into the grass, licking his face and making him shriek and scream. He doesn’t know what to do with a Richie who is careful with him.

He lets his forehead rest on Richie’s jaw and resolves that this is not an issue to address now, while he’s high and thinking about whales.

“So I saw this video on Facebook,” he says.

“Mmm, mistake number one.” When they’re this close he lowers his voice to match the minimal space between them, so his hums and grumbles and growls vibrate in his chest. Eddie’s throat tightens and then relaxes—not frightened but… somehow anticipatory. Excited.

He doesn’t share this revelation with Richie either.

“And it’s this family out in a boat somewhere around Washington, I think. Mom, dad, teenage girl. And this—” He blinks several times, trying to remember the word for a group of whales. “Troop,” he decides.

Richie tilts his head a little and Eddie guesses that was a swing and a miss.

“Of whales,” he adds.

“Oh, yes, a troop of whales,” Richie agrees. “On parade, with the colors and the rifles.”

If Eddie really wanted to, he could probably bite Richie right now. The idea has a certain appeal. But the other thing that the painkillers do is nullifies his impulse to move, and Richie is warm and comfortable, and if Eddie bit him, he would stop being comfortable pretty quickly.

The water continues to boil beside them on the stove. There’s nothing in it and no danger of it frothing over. Eddie told Richie that he would not eat spaghetti if Richie made it—which was a lie—and Richie conceded and triumphantly pulled a packet of tri-colored cheese tortellini from Ben’s fridge. Eddie can only assume that they were originally intended for a salad.

“They all go under the boat,” he goes on. “I don’t remember what kind of whales they are, but they were fucking huge whales. They could have been humpbacks—shut up—or orcas, or… I’m not a whale-ologist.”

Richie shakes a little with silent laughter. Maybe he doesn’t realize that Eddie’s picking up _all the stimuli_ right now, instead of politely numbed to it. “I did know that about you,” he adds, and then falls into a Southern drawl. “Now I’m not a licensed whale-ologist, but I know when I see me a troop of humpbacks out on the water—”

Eddie giggles a little, bracing his hand under his ribs. “Why’s he southern?”

“Why, this unlicensed whale-ologist comes outta the Gulf of Mexico in Galveston, Texas.”

“Oh, you’re a whale-ologist but you’re unlicensed?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You’re a renegade whale-ologist.”

Richie mimes a cigar with his free hand; the other remains wrapped around Eddie. “Is there any othah kind?”

“Why are renegade whale-ologists unlicensed? Are you evading the law?”

“We—” Richie breaks, laughing. “It’s just going full cowboy. Fucking Spaghetti Western.”

“It’s called fucking ‘yes, and,’ Richard,” Eddie says tartly.

Richie is physically shaking with laughter, hanging onto Eddie like he’s afraid he’s going to vibrate him away, like rocks trembling before an avalanche. “Okay, okay.” He makes a pointed throat-clearing sound and then grins at himself, falling back into the drawl. “Why—”

It comes out _wahhh_. Eddie breaks and almost falls into the counter laughing. Richie holds him up, fingers hooked through Eddie’s belt loop.

“Why, we’re drivin’ them there _sea cattle_ outta Florida out west,” Richie says, in what is likely a tenuous grasp on geography. “Too goddamn many—motorboats.” He keeps clenching his jaw and trying to fight his spasming smile. In his own voice he says, “Just tell your fucking story, man.”

“No, I want to hear about these manatee cowboys,” Eddie says seriously. “You’ve made your bed, now lie in it.”

“That’s it. That’s all I got,” Richie says.

“Did not expect the eco-warrior angle.”

Richie shakes his head. “I can’t think of anything that isn’t a fucking Ewok just—” He mimes a raging Ewok, his imaginary cigar turning into an invisible spear. “Put me out of my misery.”

“Why are the sea cowboys unregulated by the government?”

“Uh—Big Oil,” Richie says quickly. “Wants more motorboats on the water. US imperialism.”

Eddie rolls his eyes. “You can’t just pull _US imperialism_ when you run out of ideas.”

“Yeah, but they’re gonna have a flotilla of little motorboats and use them to invade the—fuck, I don’t know what’s south of Florida. Bermuda?”

“You’re just thinking of the Bermuda Triangle.”

“I’m just thinking of the Bermuda Triangle,” Richie agrees. “We—” The Voice wavers. “We drive the manatees into the Bermuda Triangle, and the motorboats follow them, and by virtue of being just like… fucking huge chunks hanging in the water, the manatees are spared and the Triangle spits them out outside Galveston at the Whale-ology Ranch.”

“What happens to the motorboats?”

“Oh, everyone but the manatees dies in this effort.”

“So it’s a suicide mission.”

“Yes, indeed-ee,” Richie says.

“What a noble calling.”

“Fuck you, man, I’d like to see you do better.”

Eddie is momentarily struck by the idea of a world in which he dedicated his life and career into environmental activism. There would probably be a lot of dirt involved.

“So my video,” Eddie says.

“Yes, your video.”

The water is boiling now. He detaches from Richie and goes to sit at the island, as Richie starts cutting open the package and shaking pasta into the pot, hissing as he burns himself.

“So the whales never come up to the surface, but they go under the boat,” he says, trying to think back. What was he doing when he saw the video? He never went on Facebook on his work computer—it was strictly against his personal code of what a good employee does—so he must have been at home. “And they’re huge and dark and you can’t see them clearly. I think the mom was taking the video, so you just see the shadow, like, out in the water, either side of the boat.” He gestures with his arms, trying to indicate just how much space the whales occupied relative to the little rowboat.

Richie glances up, nods, and sets a timer for the pasta. “You think Ben’s got a fucking colander in here?”

“I mean, he’s gotta, right?” Eddie asks doubtfully, looking around at all the cabinet space.

Richie groans as he crouches to look under the island in the storage space there, vanishing from view as surely as if he slipped underwater. “Continue, I’m listening.”

“So the daughter’s going nuts,” Eddie says. He doesn’t remember that—doesn’t remember exactly what she sounded like, whether there were words or just incoherent shrieks. “Screaming, terrified, because they’re fucking huge whales.”

He half-shrugs, because the logic of that seems pretty self-explanatory to him. If Eddie were out in a boat—which he never has been, really, despite growing up in a coastal Maine town and then moving to New York City, despite the regular availability first of fishing expeditions and then of ferries—and a bunch of fuck-off sized whales swam under it, he doesn’t know what he’d do. He understands the statistical unlikelihood of marine animal attacks—that sharks don’t harm people nearly as frequently as the media would have you believe, that _Jaws_ was one of the worst things that could happen to shark conservation efforts, that you’re far less likely to be killed by a whale if you aren’t part of the whaling industry of nineteenth-century New England—but he still feels a deep terror of things moving in dark water beneath him.

Huh. Imagine that.

Even in swimming pools—festering germ soups that they are—Eddie was always convinced that there was something under him in the water. It didn’t matter if he could see all the way to the bottom; he was certain that if he closed his eyes, something would get him. It was half of why he balked at the very prospect of wading through that sewage to get to the deeper parts of Its lair—and then the witch popped up out of nowhere ( _time to sink!_ ) and grabbed Bev, proving him right.

In the quarry when they were kids, Richie used to swim under the water—green and brown translucent water—and grab Eddie by the ankles just to make him scream. Or—and this was almost worse—grab him around the waist and surface next to him, holding him up out of the water while he tried to convince his frantic heart and lungs that he wasn’t being attacked by a sea monster. Richie never seemed to mind that once he came up—grinning like an idiot, half-blind with his glasses on the shore with their clothes—Eddie usually responded by trying to drown him. It didn’t stop him from holding Eddie up.

“Itty bitty boat,” Eddie says.

“Ha,” says Richie. There’s a clattering of metal and then a groan as Richie straightens again. Eddie’s worried about his knees. Richie holds up the colander triumphantly and waggles his eyebrows. “Itty bitty boat,” he repeats.

“So if the whales came up, they could—” He mimes with both hands, one a whale and the other a boat, the way that a whale could just lift it right out of the water. He imagines a great aquatic roll, the way that a slap of the tail might speed the boat along, might flip it, might capsize it entirely.

“And the dad’s going, like, ‘Honey, calm down! Look at them! They’re beautiful! This is amazing! Wow!’” He laughs a little and Richie laughs back as he turns to set the colander in the sink—confirming, _I’m listening_ as he multitasks.

When Eddie watched the video he always empathized with the daughter. The screaming. The fear for her life. He doesn’t know whether it’s because, deep down, he continued to think of himself as a child, or whether he understands that perfectly reasonable survival instinct, or whether he, too, was immune to a father’s comfort because Frank Kaspbrak was just never there to provide it. Now that he thinks about it, he can’t remember whether the mother said anything at all while she filmed. He can’t remember if she was able to hold the camera steady or if the video rocked with the waves.

But now he understands it, he thinks. What could that tiny boat have done, if the whales had overturned it? How insignificant would that girl’s screams be in the black water? And if the father knew there was nothing to be done about the whales—was he just trying to keep her calm? Or had he reached the point where he knew his life was out of his hands, but that this moment was exceptional, and that he might as well see the whales? If he drowned out on the water, killed by whales—was it worth it to see them?

“Did you see whales in the pot?” Richie asks. He’s not looking up; he’s prodding the floating pasta with a spoon and glancing at the timer, mouth pulling into a frown.

Eddie squints a little at him, feeling Richie is missing the point. “Not literally.”

“Oh, just figurative whales, then. Nothing to worry about.” He grins and looks up.

Eddie remembers how he looked, eyes squinting shut with quarry water but mouth still open in that same big grin, as Eddie tried to hold him under the water. The way his dumb bowl-cut floated around his head, curls and snarls and tangles lifting away from his face, almost like a mermaid. How easily he held Eddie around the ribs, the stomach, the hips. Like he was weightless.

All at once he feels not quite present—thin and wispy and insubstantial. He wants Richie to hang onto him, to anchor him, to make him feel _here_.

“Kiss me,” he says.

Richie’s expression smooths out, his eyebrows shooting up. “Right now?”

“No, next week—yes, right now.”

“Okay, okay.”

Richie balances the wooden spoon across the top of the pot, takes two steps to the side, and then leans across the island to kiss him. It’s almost performative. Eddie can imagine the 1950s soda fountain scene, and Richie the boy behind the counter serving him a malted milkshake with a peck on the lips like the cherry on top. Richie even makes a loud smacking noise when he pulls away.

Eddie doesn’t feel any more grounded. “No, for real,” he says, holding out both hands. He realizes how cold his fingers are when he lays them on either side of Richie’s head and holds him, and Richie gives up and leans all the way across the countertop to kiss back. Eddie seeks his mouth almost frantically, trying to quell something skittering and fluttery in his gut, and he can’t find it until Richie sighs and puts both elbows on the counter and leans forward far enough to push him back in his chair, pull his lower lip into his mouth.

He thinks, dazedly, that Richie is learning how he likes to be kissed. Fuck, _Eddie_ is learning how he likes to be kissed. He’s never really _enjoyed_ it before.

Richie’s phone alarm goes off. Richie makes an abbreviated noise into Eddie’s mouth and pulls back with a wet sound. “Hang on,” he says, pushing himself away from the counter and leaning toward the stove like taking a step would be going too far.

Eddie worries his lower lip with his teeth, trying to get the same spark of pleasure on his own, as he watches Richie lurch around the kitchen, muttering to himself as he knocks over the wooden spoon and quickly pulls it away from the burner, tipping the contents of the pot into the colander and making steam billow up into his face. It’s interesting, he thinks. Richie is just interesting. Eddie’s interested.

“So how’s your video end?” Richie asks. He’s holding the colander up and shaking it to make more water drip out.

“Hmm?” Eddie asks, distracted by Richie’s forearms.

Richie looks over at him, eyebrows high and expectant. “Your whales?” he prompts. “How’s the video end.”

“Oh,” Eddie says, and then shrugs his left shoulder again. “I don’t remember.”

Richie smiles as he sets the colander back in the sink and goes for bowls. “You were just thinking about whales?”

“I was just thinking about whales,” Eddie agrees. He’s not sure he could say any of his confused impressions about subaquatic lifeforms and Richie in the quarry and what it means to die for something out loud. Even if he did, he thinks Richie would either laugh at him or ask him where the fuck his head’s at, with that incredulous little grin that mocks him and his concerns.

Richie has, by now, worked out that it’s easier for Eddie to eat food when it’s presented like a snack, so he throws all the plain tortellini in a bowl, heats sauce in a ramekin in the microwave, and hands Eddie a fork. Eddie feels like they’re splitting a bowl of popcorn during a movie or something. Richie perches on the other barstool and dips tortellini into the sauce and squints hard with far-away eyes, clearly actively thinking about something. Eddie doesn’t prompt him. Richie has never needed encouragement to speak his mind.

About half an hour later, the food he consumed becomes fuel for his body and he feels his brain come back online.

“Marine biologist!” he says, apropos of nothing.

Richie, who has jumped at least thirty topics of conversation by now, just laughs. The man is in the business of callbacks, and he’s already gotten the biggest one of his life.

* * *

One afternoon he comes out of his guest bedroom—where he retreats to do his coughing and breathing exercises, and to stretch—and finds Richie with his headphones in, pacing in the living room, clearly talking to himself. Eddie leans around the corner in curiosity, but the scraps he catches include “eating a live chameleon” and “possibly be doing, wearing pork pie hats?” so Eddie assumes that Richie is either suffering a psychological break or writing.

He goes into the study area—it’s not a room, because Ben’s house isn’t really divided into rooms, for reasons that Eddie has to assume come down to _postmodernism_. He has a mental image he thinks might come from _Bye Bye, Birdie_ —though he can’t remember ever actually seeing _Bye Bye, Birdie_ —of a person upside-down on a couch while on the phone. He has half-formed mental images of making a phone call from the floor with his legs hooked over Goldie the golden turtle statue—but then he considers the weight that this would put on his chest and decides just to lie next to Goldie. He puts down a pillow and everything so he doesn’t hurt himself.

Then he calls Mike. He lies on the floor with his phone to his ear and feels stoned and ageless, timeless. When Eddie was growing up, the landline was in the hallway in the center of the house. Eddie doubts that his mother arranged it that way by design, but it was certainly convenient for her to monitor Eddie’s communications. And then, as an adult—he never really had anyone to call, unrelated to work. And even if he had wanted to—he would have judged any husband who wanted to hide his phone calls from his wife. The concealment was inherently suspicious.

Mike picks up with a warm, calm, “Hi, Eddie.”

“I don’t want to interrupt you if you’re doing something either very interesting or possibly dangerous,” Eddie says. He has a vague idea that there’s a lot of hiking in Yellowstone and a good sense of the dangers of hiking accidents.

“I’m not,” Mike says. “Mostly I’m just looking at stuff, you know? If I were in a tour group or something I’d have put my phone on silent. How are you?”

“Ben has this turtle statue,” Eddie says.

There is a pause that Eddie belatedly realizes is Mike waiting for him to elaborate, and then Mike chuckles. “Yeah, I saw the pictures in the group chat.”

“Richie named her Goldie and now we’re just hanging out. Me and Goldie. I mean—me and Richie, Richie and I also hang out, but right now I’m hanging out with Goldie.”

“Not a great conversationalist, huh?” Mike asks.

“No, but I wanted to know how you were doing,” Eddie says. His worry about Mike is a mixture of friendly concern for his isolated friend’s emotional wellbeing and the last screaming remnants of his risk analyst brain being very worried about geysers, hiking trails, and the odd grizzly bear.

And he’s a little pleased to be able to ask Mike how he’s doing, when the Losers so often ask him _how are you doing?_ in the group chat, and mean, _How is your life-threatening injury? How are your pain levels? Have you killed and buried Richie in Ben’s yard yet?_

Part of him wants to talk about Richie with the Losers. Not as a group talking behind Richie’s back. But it would be nice to have just one of them to confide in. Eddie can’t remember having a confidant. Growing up, Bill Denbrough was his best friend, but Eddie didn’t have any great secrets.

Well, aside from the obvious, but that came later. And if he wasn’t ready to admit it to himself, he certainly wasn’t going to whisper it to Bill.

He’s not going to out Richie to their friends. He just thinks it’s refreshing, sort of, to have the impulse to tell people about what’s going on in his life—not because he thinks it’s the thing to do, like telling his wife about his day no matter how dull, but because he thinks they’d share in his joy. He wonders what Heather from HR would have to say about his sudden longing for human connection.

_I’m happy_. The thought comes with a shocked sort of shiver over his skin.

Mike laughs a little and Eddie focuses, wondering if he’s missed something while being self-absorbed. “I’m doing good, man,” Mike says. “I’m seeing a lot of… lot of good stuff. I mean, Yellowstone has its own troubled history.” He says this as if it’s something Eddie should know about.

Eddie waits for several long seconds before he asks, “What the fuck is under Yellowstone, Mike?”

Mike laughs. “Okay, okay, not what I meant. I was mostly talking about the wars on the Shoshone who lived in the park year-round. No alien demons that I know of, just good old racism.”

With the sense that he’s failing somehow, Eddie admits, “You should talk to Richie. He was—being Trashmouth the other day, and out of fucking nowhere he went ‘US imperialism.’”

It comes out flat, mostly because Eddie has no idea how to explain the manatee story to Mike, but he feels like Mike should get it anyway.

“Yeah?” Mike says. “About what?”

“Big Oil,” Eddie admits.

Mike just groans into the phone. “Jesus Christ.”

Eddie is not sure what to make of this—does Mike not want to discuss Big Oil?

“I don’t know if I have the energy to interrogate Trashmouth’s political sensibilities, man,” Mike says. “I don’t know if I’m emotionally prepared to dive into that.”

Eddie feels for a moment like there’s a glass wall between what he knows about Richie, which he can only assume Richie is continuing to conceal from the rest of the world, and what Mike knows about Richie. Because Mike was in Derry and—it’s not like Eddie thinks Mike didn’t have anything better to do than to keep track of them as they went out into the world and started making names for themselves (some of them, anyway)—but Eddie started to go a little bit insane watching YouTube clips from Rich Tozier’s standup on his phone at his gate in the airport.

“He doesn’t really think those things,” Eddie says softly, feeling like he has to defend Richie, like he has to protect him.

Mike’s voice is a little flat. “What things.”

“The things he says in his shows,” Eddie says. “He doesn’t—there’s a persona, it’s not… that’s not… Richie,” he finishes lamely.

Mike is quiet for several moments.

Eddie almost adds, _Not my Richie, anyway_ , but he thinks that would sound too infantile and too revealing at the same time, so he keeps it inside. He rubs absently at his dirty beard with the inside of his wrist, just to feel the scrape.

“When you walked into the restaurant,” Mike says softly, “what was that like for you? The remembering?”

Eddie feels malleable and suggestible and a little sad, and his brain goes back to the Chinese restaurant with the waitress who knew Mike by name, who listened to all of Eddie’s dietary requirements with a serious and patient look on her face instead of the _go fuck yourself_ expression so many restaurants in New York have for people with restrictions. The way he looked up and found so many familiar eyes in unfamiliar faces staring at him. How he didn’t know what to do but he assumed they were angry with him, almost, and he smiled as though trying to deescalate an argument.

“Why?” he asks, feeling how small his voice comes out.

“I don’t think I’ll ever understand it,” Mike replies, voice calm and warm again.

Eddie thinks of him talking about his master’s thesis—the one that kept dissolving in the Derry library—and mentioning going to Bangor to do interviews. Mike’s not just good at seeking information, he’s good at coaxing it out of people. Even—and if he was interviewing people about It—horrifying moments.

He takes a deep breath and says, “I felt like this massive fucking disappointment, honestly.”

“Why?” Mike asks, tone immediately conciliatory and sympathetic at once. The _I would never say that about you_ is implicit.

Eddie grinds the palm of his hand against his cheek, trying to keep himself in his body. If he gives in entirely he’ll spill his guts about everything to Mike, and he has secrets that aren’t his to tell, now.

“Because Bev said, ‘Tell me you became a doctor.’ And—I don’t know. I think I’m having a midlife crisis.” He laughs a little and feels an answering pain in his ribs.

Mike pauses for a moment and then says, “I don’t know how to break this to you, but literally none of you became doctors.”

Eddie laughs again, more sincerely. “I know. I was just thinking—Bill, Bev, Ben, and Richie all became artists, kind of. You’re an academic, you get all that highbrow shit, I don’t know. You can quote fucking Shakespeare at brunch.”

Mike clears his throat. “Uh, yeah, sorry about that, I was mostly trying to get Richie’s goat, not yours.”

Eddie groans. “I can’t believe he owns that stupid fucking shirt.” He’s wearing it right now. It doesn’t even smell like Richie anymore, now that Richie’s done laundry. “No, tear him apart, I don’t care.”

Mike laughs. “What about Stan?”

“Stan has—” Eddie sits up a little bit, hissing with pain, and braces himself on Goldie the turtle statue. “—like, the American dream. He did everything right—he went out, he married the perfect woman, he worked really hard, he has his own business, his own house.” He waves a hand. “I thought I’d get some solidarity from someone who has to live in the real world, but Stan friggin’ blew me out of the water there, too. Stan did everything right.”

And Eddie—tried to do those things. Sort of. They have an apartment in New York, and they don’t own it outright, but Eddie has the money that he thinks he could buy it, if he wanted to. He married Myra, he worked really hard, he lost himself in his work. He’s not necessarily interested in starting his own firm—his frequent encounters with Heather from HR tells him that he’s not cut out for management—but he probably could go for partner, if he felt like it.

He doesn’t feel like it.

“I was just thinking the other night about, what if I’d become a doctor, and I hadn’t done all that shit I felt like I had to? What if I’d done real work with, like, Doctors Without Borders, and helped cure infectious diseases, and got fucking therapy, and moved out of my mother’s house, and—and didn’t have to come out at fucking forty, and get a divorce, and—”

He realizes, all at once, that he is lamenting about lost time to Mike fucking Hanlon. And Mike is just listening.

He sighs through his nose. “I don’t know. I just wish that I hadn’t forgotten. I feel like—I liked being that kid who fought It with you. I think he was better than—how I turned out. And I think that if I remembered being him, I’d have been able to do better.”

“Depends on how you measure success,” Mike says.

That’s true. He was able to get away from Derry, at least, if not away from Sonia and then the memory of Sonia. He has money. He shouldn’t be complaining about this to Mike.

“Sorry,” he says.

Mike says, “Man, you don’t have to apologize to me.”

But Eddie feels like he does.

“I thought I was calling you back to Derry to die,” Mike says. “Anything you ever owed me—that was the blood oath. You came back. You went beyond that, by helping me kill It.”

And Mike made it clear, at the restaurant, that he wouldn’t have blamed them for not coming back when he called. Even when Stan staggered in late and visibly sick—Mike looked astonished. Like he thought maybe none of them would come at all. Like he thought he’d have to fight It alone.

“What was it like for you?” Eddie asks.

Mike is quiet for several moments. Eddie can’t hear anything, even breathing.

“You still there?”

“Yeah,” Mike says. He sighs. “I’ve been thinking—probably since I got my bachelor’s, actually—how fucked up it is that we expect people to make lifelong decisions based on the—the available information, I guess—when they’re thirteen. Like, I always knew I was gonna try to go to college—my mom and dad worked too fucking hard for me not to try, at least. But it’s not like I spent my whole life thinking _man, I really want to work at a public library_.”

“What did you want to do?”

Mike laughs. “Would you believe, I don’t remember?”

Eddie is quiet.

“I wanted to be my dad,” Mike says. “I wanted to be just like him. If he hadn’t gotten sick… I don’t know.”

They have a moment of silence for Will Hanlon.

“You wanted to travel,” Eddie offers weakly.

“I did,” Mike says. “I don’t know… when I realized I was going to be the last one. I don’t think that the rest of you were really… I mean, we had the farm.”

“Yes,” Eddie says.

“Bill’s dad got sick too,” Mike says. “And I thought—it’s gonna be him or me. And then his dad died, and his mom moved, and…”

And Mike was all alone.

“What happened to the farm?” Eddie asks. He feels like his voice should crack, asking.

“Mom sold the land,” Mike says. “She had to. Farming’s tough.” He laughs. “Boom—there’s my school money.”

He doesn’t know what to do with this mental image of Mike, who started out so tied to the land and hated by Derry, and ended up simultaneously as a big name in town and almost squatting in his place of work. He feels like he should ask what happened to Mike’s mother—but also that, if Mike’s mother were alive, surely Mike wouldn’t have been living alone in the town library.

“Is it better?” Eddie asks. “Now that you’re out—is it better?”

This time when Mike laughs it seems more genuine. “Is it better camping at Yellowstone National Park than living in Derry waiting for a nightmare from my childhood to kill and eat me? Yeah, Eddie, it’s better.”

“But are you happier?”

“Yes,” Mike says immediately. Then he pauses and says, “Picture a road.”

“Uh-huh,” Eddie says, lying back down with a little hiss. “I’m okay.”

“Good. So—there’s nothing on either side of this road. And the car’s empty, it’s just you. And you can go literally anywhere. Either—on that road, or to an airport, or.”

Eddie gets it. The way that all roads are connected. He can imagine it—yawning gray sky, cornfields gnawed down to tan stubble.

“Yeah,” he says.

“Where do you go?” Mike asks, the laugh in his voice.

And Eddie understands how he feels. That overwhelming choice. It’s why he clung so hard to the concrete things he had to accomplish after getting out of the hospital—getting his ID, his bank cards, his life in order. He had to do the obvious things before he could even think about the possible things.

_Los Angeles_ , Eddie thinks, but does not say.

“I always wanted to travel when I was a kid,” he says, contemplative once more. That’s not quite accurate—he wanted to run away when he was a kid. He was obsessed with trains, with soapbox cars, with anything he thought could get him away. He wanted to be in transit, in the place between places, safe where no one could find him or put name to where he was.

He can hear the smile in Mike’s voice. “Yeah?”

“Yeah,” he says.

“Well, I’m starting to think that most national park tours are more pleasant when you’ve got a buddy,” Mike says. “Maybe we can do that when you’re feeling up to it.”

“Yes,” Eddie says immediately. He will go on a road trip with Mike if it means that Mike isn’t completely alone. “I told you that you’re not supposed to get lonely. You’re supposed to come back if you feel lonely.”

He doesn’t think that Ben would mind if Mike also came to stay in the house. There’s certainly room for him. It might be awkward, explaining to Richie that they had to make a decision about whether to tell Mike or not, but it would be preferable to Mike being halfway across the country and sad.

Mike sounds a little nervous when he chuckles this time. “I wouldn’t say lonely. A lot of people are here with their families, but there are a lot of, like, single writers out here finding themselves. I fit right in.” There’s a slight click from the other end of the line. “I, uh. Went on a date.”

Eddie sits up, clips his shoulder off Goldie the turtle statue’s head, and immediately hits the ground again. _“Ouch,”_ he snarls, rolling towards Goldie as though he can muffle himself in her leg.

From behind him, Richie asks, “You okay?”

Eddie jumps again, this time with less painful consequences.

“Eddie?” Mike asks. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” Eddie says to both of them. Instead of asking Richie how long he’s been there, he rolls towards him and says, “Mike went on a date!”

“With who?” Richie asks.

Eddie adjusts the position of his phone on his ear. “With who?” he asks.

“Is that Richie?” Mike asks.

“My question first!”

“With a tour guide,” Mike says patiently.

Eddie pulls the phone away slightly. “He went on a date with a tour guide.”

“Yes, and—?” Richie demands, spinning his right hand in a circle as though he can press the details from Eddie if he just gestures at him aggressively enough.

“And?” Eddie asks him, perplexed.

Richie raises his eyebrows at him and inclines his head, looking at him as though he should understand. Then he makes two fists, turns them so his palms are facing up, and pelvic thrusts sharply, snapping his hips to a full stop.

Eddie’s eyebrows shoot up and he realizes he’s gaping at him. Richie tilts his head even further and wiggles his eyebrows at him.

“You still there?” Mike asks patiently in his ear.

Eddie jumps for a third time, rolls his eyes at Richie, and turns away. “Richie wants to know how it went.”

“Oh does he?” Mike asks.

“Yes,” Eddie says, determinedly not looking at Richie.

Mike chuckles a little. “I mean, I don’t think I’m going to change my travel plans over it. But yeah, I had a good time.”

“He had a good time,” Eddie reports, and despite his better judgment, he looks over his shoulder.

Richie, as always when he is at risk of being ignored, has escalated. He is currently standing sideways in the door with his shoulders braced on one side of the door frame, his hands on the other, and appears to be idly rolling his hips. Eddie is a little surprised that Richie’s balance is that good, actually.

And his hip control.

And his ass.

“How good?” Richie asks.

Eddie experiences a horrific moment where he’s afraid he said those thoughts out loud and he looks up at Richie’s face in complete panic, before he connects Richie’s words with the last thing he said. He rolls over again and stares at the underside of Goldie the golden turtle statue.

“Richie wants to know all about your emotional connection,” he says to Mike.

Mike laughs. “Yeah, I know what he wants to know.”

Eddie might be blushing. Just a little.

“I did not have a one-night stand with a tour guide,” Mike says patiently. “I don’t know how long I’m gonna be here, I don’t want to spend it making someone’s day job awkward.”

“He didn’t,” Eddie reports to Richie.

Richie’s voice is pained. “Mike.”

Eddie glances over his shoulder to see Richie just about doubled over, his long arms hanging down in an expression of total defeat.

“Are you going out again?” Eddie asks.

“Maybe?” Mike says. “We were pretty up front about like—I don’t know how long I’ll be here and I’m not looking for anything long-term, I just… I got out and I felt like, _wow, I have every opportunity in the world, I have to go make the most out of my life, I have to do all the crazy shit I never did!_ But also… I’m still me. Like, my idea of a great night is still going to bed early with a good book.”

Eddie laughs.

“What?” Richie says.

Eddie glances over and sees that Richie has graduated from cartoonish despair to a slow macarena. He shakes his head and turns away again before Richie can get to the hip shaking part.

“I get that,” Eddie says. “Kind of like— _I want to do this and eat this and do this and go here and—_ but like, I still gotta…”

“I mean,” Mike says. “As long as it’s things you actually want to do. If it’s all… Like, as soon as I got out of Derry I thought—I probably won’t actually want to go rock climbing. That does not sound like something I would enjoy as much as I think I will. Hiking, though, that I could probably do.”

“And can you?” Eddie asks.

Mike says, “Oh my god, Eddie, I died on one of the walks up here.”

Eddie laughs. “What?”

“It was like going up the side of a mountain. Like—it was so steep. It was really fucking steep. So I’m sitting down on a rock, trying to catch my breath, wondering if I need to make a phone call so you all can hear my last words—and this fucking giant dude just strolls down the mountain like it’s his walk to his mailbox in the morning.”

Eddie raises his eyebrows. If Mike Hanlon thinks a dude is a giant dude… “Like, taller than you?”

“Taller than me,” Mike says. “And I say, ‘How are you doing that?’ And he turns to me, and he says, ‘I’m from Nepal. There is no flat land in my country. And this hill is small.’ And he just fucking walks off!”

Eddie starts to laugh so helplessly he’s physically trembling. “This hill?”

“‘This hill is small,’” Mike repeats.

Eddie wheezes. “You have to tell Richie that,” he says, and turns around to look for him. Richie will think it’s hysterical; Richie might steal it for a routine. “Rich—”

But Richie has macarenaed away.

* * *

Eddie does not like having a beard. He felt like through puberty he was fighting with his body most of the time—when he wasn’t fighting with his mother about his body—and now that he _can_ grow facial hair, he really feels like he shouldn’t.

He remembers the faint competition they all had in high school, trying to have some kind of showing—the faint rust-colored goatee that Bill grew at seventeen; the time that Richie walked into their clubhouse ( _were they still in the clubhouse?)_ and said something and Stan said, “I’m sorry, I can’t hear you over the sound of your _bad mustache.”_

The point is—he’s a grown man, and he hates the sensation of having like a fuzzy or a hair in his mouth maybe more than any other sensation he has ever experienced. Being stabbed felt like being punched in the face. Being impaled—felt like being punched in the back, since he went into shock almost instantly and then started to die. Having a foreign object in his mouth is just gross. He doesn’t know what it is. Probably dust.

But he assumes it’s a beard hair, because he just has hair around his mouth now and that’s a hazard. So he works the thing in his mouth around to the front with his tongue, and then he sticks his tongue out and pulls it off, and—

It’s a little blue thread.

He stares at it for several long moments, taking note of the bloodstain and the way that one end is tapered, like it’s been pulled away for something, before he makes the connection.

“Oh fuck,” he sighs, his nervous system ratcheting into high alert.

Richie, on the other end of the couch keeping Eddie’s feet warm, straightens up at once. “Huh?”

He takes a deep breath, hoping that this is just a loose thread from a shirt or from some piece of furniture (it’s not, all of Ben’s furniture is hyper-modern and glossy and hasn’t seen enough use anyway to start getting threadbare). But the stitches they put in his cheek are dissolvable stitches, they told him that at some point when he was recovering, and he knew this was coming. It just freaks him out a little.

He feels at his cheek. He was fucking around with his dirty beard earlier, he can imagine dragging over the little threads and, if they were already fine, breaking them. Or—he doesn’t know how this works. Did they dissolve in the center, in his skin, and break apart on either side? Or are there still little holes in his skin? He hasn’t tried holding water in his mouth in that cheek or anything, a little worried about tiny drops sliding out onto his cheek.

“Huh?” Richie repeats, leaning over to look at him. “You good?”

Eddie, who has been gradually edging towards the middle of the couch and contemplating maybe falling asleep on Richie’s huge shoulder if he seems amenable, is suddenly wide awake. He leans back a little, reflexively, aware only of the potential hole in his face and—while not a wound, it’s a vulnerability. He flinches.

It’s a short movement. There’s not a lot of room for him to lean back without toppling over, and the muscles in his torso are too stiff for him to do that. But Richie freezes, his eyes very wide, and then leans back slowly.

“Sorry,” Eddie says. “Sorry, I—my stitches are dissolving, and—” His hands are shaking.

“Oh,” Richie says. He looks plastic, somehow. Inorganic, less Richie. Eddie knows he fucked up, and he knows how, he just doesn’t understand _why_.

“Yeah,” Eddie says, carefully pulling his toes out from the crooks behind Richie’s knees. “I’m gonna—”

“Yeah, sure,” Richie says, leaning back and trying to resume his casual lounge. It doesn’t work.

“I, uh, I might need help,” Eddie says. “If—I’ll go check first, but.”

“Oh,” Richie says. He relaxes marginally. “Should I—fuck.” He picks up the remote and pauses the TV. “Yeah?”

“Yeah,” Eddie says, and walks to the bathroom feeling agitated and tense for reasons beyond the holes in his face. He turns on the light in the bathroom and the reflective glass and stone do nothing to help him relax. He leans forward and peers at his cheek.

There are six stitches in his face. One of them—towards the center—sits crooked now in a way it definitely didn’t when he was gingerly brushing his teeth this morning. He reaches up with his bad hand—the first two fingers and the thumb are numb and tingling, but he can still use them. He pinches at the errant stitch, the little knot sitting gently outside of his skin and—it comes away easily. There’s no sliding feeling in his skin. There are two small indentations on either side of the stitch, but they don’t look like holes. At least—not like tiny holes that go all the way through his skin and into his mouth. He can’t see anything through them. They look like… acne scars, maybe. Not as bad as he expected.

He realizes he’s light-headed and puts his head down on the countertop and takes deep breaths. He has stitches in his chest and back. Having to contend with the stitches in his mouth, on a daily basis, seems like too much to ask. He wants them all in place where they’re supposed to be or not there at all. He thought that having dissolvable stitches would be less to worry about, but now he’s thinking about the irritating sensation of having something in his mouth, and how long it took him staring at that bloodstain before he identified the thread for what it was, and he has to remove them. He can remove them safely if they’re dissolving, but he needs them out, right now.

“Richie!” he calls.

Richie appears from much closer by than Eddie expected. Like, from the end of the hall, not all the way in the living room with the silent TV. Eddie hears him accelerate and then he’s in the doorway, looking at him. Eddie doesn’t exactly love the mental image of Richie hovering in the house, waiting for him to decide if a medical emergency is happening, but it helps that Richie only inserted himself when Eddie asked for him.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, Kool-Aid man,” Eddie says, because that’s what his great lurch into the doorway reminded him of. He might as well have gone through the wall.

“Lemme walk that back to an ‘ _oh_ yeah,’ then,” Richie says, hands up on the doorframe again. “Whaddaya need?”

Eddie’s trying to think of what he has in his toiletry bag. “Uh—a lighter? Or, wait, no.” He probably doesn’t need to use metal for this, and he’s not convinced he wouldn’t melt his little scissors anyway. “Or like, vodka, from Ben’s bar downstairs? Whatever the strongest stuff is.”

He has nail scissors in his nail kit (naturally), and small scissors in his sewing kit in case of a missing button or an emergency tear that needs to be fixed in his clothes, but he’s not sure what’s the better approach here. He has used his nail scissors for their intended purpose, and human fingernails are filthy, so maybe the sewing scissors are the way to go? But he doubts that there’s much difference in the two, except that the sewing scissors have plastic handles instead of metal.

Richie blinks at him and tilts his head. “Uh, I don’t have any weed, but like, you never got turnt in high school, did you?” He pronounces it very crisply, the ending consonant on the word unmistakable.

“I’m not starting now!” Eddie says quickly, because he’s still on heavy pain medication. “Don’t drink any.”

“Oh, you can’t have fun, so I can’t have fun?”

“Yes,” Eddie replies immediately, but then has a fucking _blinding_ mental image of Richie flopping back on a bed, all bare skin and dark hair in white sheets. _Oh my god,_ he thinks, horrified. _Oh my god, what the hell was that._ “Go!” he tells Richie, lest he start wondering about his masturbation habits _in front of him._

Richie can only see that Eddie’s upset and not why, so he must assume his need for a lighter and/or alcohol is very dire. He goes off to the stairway like he’s on a quest, and Eddie hears him thumping down the steps.

Eddie swallows and tries to blot heat from his burning face as he goes to retrieve his toiletry kit. They weren’t even talking about sex, it just popped up in Eddie’s mind the way that old anxieties about medical conditions did. And it’s not like—not like Eddie’s gonna say that Richie _can’t_ , if they ever talk about it. Like—Eddie would like to date, and the idea of Richie with other people makes him just _incandescently jealous_ , so he’s not going to say that Richie should go off and have casual sex until Eddie’s, uh, ready for distinctly non-casual sex ( _formal sex_ , the little voice in his head that sounds like Richie suggests), but. Uh. It’s fine. If Richie… has fun. On his own. Eddie doesn’t have to… be involved. Directly.

But he could be. Or indirectly.

The idea of Richie jerking off to him—that maybe Richie _already has,_ at some point—is so flustering that when Richie returns to the bathroom Eddie has carefully unpacked both his nail kit and his sewing kit and is repacking them to make sure all the little nail clippers and cuticle pushers and cards of colored thread are secure in their containers.

“You’re gonna sew your fingernails to your face,” Richie guesses. He’s holding a large glass bottle of clear liquor.

That idea is so revolting that it refocuses Eddie’s brain beautifully and he turns to look at him in honest disgust.

Richie shrugs. “We were in second grade together, you know I’m good at extrapolating meaning from context.”

Eddie’s brain helpfully provides him with a mental image of the wire rack with the books for quiet reading time on it. There was one about cars and engines, and Eddie enjoyed that, but there was also one explaining the anatomy of cats… Eddie can remember the close-up illustrations of a pink paw and the description of sweat glands.

He blinks hard, trying to focus on the task. He suspects—and based on his general preference for sedatives, this seems likely—that his brain doesn’t want to think about the extremely unpleasant thing he’s about to do, and so it’s grasping at straws to avoid it. Apparently the two genres it went for were “repressed and pointless childhood memories” and “what does Richie do in bed?” So there’s that.

“I know you were sent to the principal’s office four times in one week,” Eddie replies, because he’s digging that up again—how he and Bill exchanged looks, how uncomfortable it was to be left in the wake of that awkward silence as Richie’s friends.

Richie grins wider. “I know you got badges for being a fucking narc!”

“It wasn’t being a narc,” Eddie says. “It was being Good Citizen, and I won that seven times, and only one of those was by default because everyone else in the class had forgotten their homework or were being disciplined.”

“Oh, _disciplined_ ,” Richie says. “Tell me more about what you think getting _disciplined_ is like.”

“For a seven-year-old?” Eddie asks. “No. Give me that.” He taps the counter for Richie to set the bottle down, because he’s worried that numb arm won’t support the weight and then they’ll have broken glass to deal with.

Without questioning it, Richie sets the bottle down and turns the label so that Eddie can read it. “You’re never gonna believe this,” he says.

Eddie stares at the label. He just never thought he was that into alcohol as an adult—Myra liked wine, but drinking was dangerous on the amount of medication Eddie was taking, and is dangerous with almost any, so he didn’t. It was a shock when he went to Derry and suddenly gin and juice started looking like a really good idea.

“You divide it by two, right?” he asks.

“Yup,” Richie says, popping the P.

The alcohol he has brought is Spirytus vodka. 192 proof, according to the label.

Which by Eddie’s math, means that it is ninety-six percent alcohol.

Eddie takes a deep breath. “How expensive do you think that stuff is?”

Richie shakes his head as though this is immaterial. “Oh, like, less than twenty bucks. Don’t worry about it, I can buy Ben a new one easy.”

Slowly, Eddie raises his head to turn his horrified gaze on Richie. Richie just grins back at him, visibly enjoying how out of his depth Eddie is right now.

“Do we need to—like— _talk_ to Ben about this?” Eddie asks. It’s probably a latent sense of responsibility manifesting, and he has no idea what to do with it.

“Nah,” Richie says easily.

In the face of the vodka, Eddie feels like he needs the stronger pair of scissors, and the nail scissors have a metal handle. He tests his ability to lift the glass bottle with one hand before he actually tries it, and it’s still mostly full and he gets it off the counter easily enough, so he lines up the scissors with the sink and pours the vodka over the little blades.

Richie looks almost disappointed that the vodka’s being used for sterilization purposes. Eddie opens and shuts the scissors a couple of times under the stream to be sure that all the surfaces are cleaned, then he wipes them carefully down on a paper towel.

He’s wiping down his cheek with the cleaning stuff he uses on his other incisions when the numbness in his fingers intensifies, buzzing. It’s just because he’s thinking about it, he tells himself. His chest always hurts more when he thinks about it, and when he stops thinking about it he won’t notice it. But of course now he can’t stop thinking about his arm and his hand, and the buzzing numbness is starting to turn to pain, to pins and needles, to that feeling of circulation returning to numb feet and prickling so strong that if he moves he thinks he’ll vomit—

“Can you wash your hands?” Eddie asks, turning toward him.

Richie’s eyebrows lift reflexively, and his hands jerk toward the sink and then stop. His expression changes—eyebrows lifting further, mouth opening a little in surprise—as he understands why Eddie’s asking.

“Oh,” he says. “Uh.”

Eddie waits for a long moment. Richie seems very pale, all of a sudden.

“Are you gonna throw up?” Eddie asks.

Richie swallows. “No,” he says. Then he takes a deep breath and admits, “Maybe. Is it—? Uh.”

“Are you about to show me why you didn’t become a dentist?” Eddie asks dryly, as though there was ever anything about Richie that wanted to be like his parents, as though he didn’t spend their childhood and adolescence talking about how he was going to get out of Derry someday—he was going to get out of Derry and he was gonna make it! And now here he is. In a bathroom in New York with Eddie Kaspbrak.

Richie swallows again. “Are they, uh—gonna bleed? Because I can—if it’s not gonna hurt you, I can do it, but if you’re gonna bleed I’m probably gonna throw up, yeah.”

Eddie blinks at him. “You can’t do blood?” He doesn’t remember that. He remembers Richie being the gross kid who asked to pop other people’s zits, who on one occasion actually peeled dead skin off of Bill’s sunburn for him.

Richie’s eyebrows lift and his face goes very long and flat, somehow repelling, like he’s building a wall there. “Do you think I might have some issues with your blood now?” he asks loudly. “Do you think I might have some problems with you bleeding on me? That that might bring up some bad memories for me?”

Eddie blinks back at him. “Really? Was that hard for you? Because it’s a fucking great memory for me, dude,” he replies in exactly the same tone.

Richie drops his eyes and smiles a little thinly. “God, you’re such a dick,” he says, but his voice sounds fond.

“I don’t think they’ll bleed,” Eddie says. “They’re dissolving stitches, if they’re falling apart already it’s because I’m basically already healed and they’ve done their job, right?”

Richie looks at Eddie’s cheek and pales further. Eddie is starting to understand what people mean by the phrase ‘green about the gills.’ Richie’s gone very sallow at the edges.

“If you have to throw up, dude, just like, let me leave first,” Eddie says. He has a sympathetic gag reflex and always has; the idea of both of them vomiting in this bathroom, side by side in the two sinks, is kind of funny in a sad way.

Richie shakes his head. “I’m good.”

They stare at each other for a long moment.

“Oh you mean _now_?” Richie asks, as though Eddie was prepping his tools for maybe next weekend.

Eddie rolls his eyes and holds out his right hand. “Feel my hand. Come on.”

Richie obediently places both hands on either side of Eddie’s. They’re really warm. Eddie only realizes how cold he is in relation to Richie’s heat, and he can only really feel that on the outer side of his hand, in his smaller two fingers. The rest of his hand is mostly just humming numbness.

“Jesus, you’re freezing,” Richie says, shifting his grip immediately to cover Eddie’s fingers with his palms and warm them. It’s really sweet; Eddie feels a sudden tightness in his throat.

“I can’t feel that,” Eddie admits. He curls his ring and pinkie fingers in Richie’s gentle hold; he scratches a little at Richie’s flat palm with his fingernails, just to watch him twitch in response. “These guys, I can feel with. Not the other two. Bend my hand back.” He shows what he means, turning his left hand flat like a high-five to show what he means.

Richie frowns a little but gently puts pressure on Eddie’s fingers, tilting his hand up and back. The buzzing feeling intensifies. Eddie blows air out when it becomes too intense and Richie stops immediately.

“Yeah, I can’t do that on my own,” Eddie says. He gestures at the vodka bottle. “I thought I was gonna drop that. So my ability to use scissors is a little compromised right now.”

Richie’s frown is deepening, his brow furrowing as though in concentration. “Is that your broken arm?”

“I don’t know,” Eddie replies. “They said I had nerve damage in the hospital.” He slides his hand out of Richie’s and Richie lets him go immediately. He gestures to the sink. “Can you do this for me?”

“Yeah,” Richie says. “Yeah, hang on. Not the weirdest thing I’ve been asked to do.”

He washes his forearms too, all the way up to the elbows, like he’s scrubbing up for surgery. Eddie finds himself getting weirdly worked up as he watches, breathing constricting a little. He tries to breathe through it.

“I looked up the symptoms of leprosy the other night,” he admits, confession-like.

“Oh, cool,” Richie says. He dries his hands with a clean paper towel and _then_ turns off the water with the towel. Eddie’s frankly impressed by this display of sanitation. “You ever see _Kingdom of Heaven_?”

Eddie blinks. “What?”

“Yeah, King Baldwin the whateverth—the fourth?” He stops, turns his head a little, and frowns, then focuses back on Eddie. “Wanders around in an iron mask all the time. Not to be confused with _The Man in the Iron Mask._ ” He shrugs and picks up the scissors. “Eva Green’s son too, in the extended cut. But yeah, this leper king totally beats down a dude. I don’t remember what for. The whole movie had me feeling some kind of way about eyeliner.”

He puts his left hand under Eddie’s chin and tilts his head back a little.

They’re already standing very close. Eddie looks up at him without issue, left hand hanging on to the counter as Richie turns him a little to get better light.

“People don’t use that word anymore,” he says. “‘Leper.’ It’s ‘leprosy patient.’ Or ‘Hansen’s disease’ now, I think.”

Scissors in hand, Richie tilts his head to the side as though in resignation. “Well, that’s half my next routine I gotta throw out,” he says. “Can’t start an uprising in the colonies. Look how that worked out for the British.”

Eddie continues to stare at him. Richie is still a little pale, and he’s definitely running his mouth in a nervous way, not in a way that actually seeks a response. For a moment Eddie thinks he’ll match him with the babbling, that it’ll all come spilling out: the game that Eddie used to play where he was a sick tramp riding the rails, the pursuit outside Neibolt, the voice saying _I’ll blow you for a quarter. A dime. A nickel. I’ll do it for free._

But Richie immediately made reference to _the colonies_ —presumably leper colonies. Groups of people with leprosy who lived together in groups, in societies, outside of populations they could infect. Eddie remembers now that he has heard of them. People who supported each other in their illnesses, and who managed to have lives together in spite of their deteriorating conditions.

Richie’s first thought was a movie, and his second thought was _groups_ of people with leprosy.

So why is Eddie’s first thought a lone sick man?

“What kind of way about eyeliner?” he asks. He’s trying to imagine Richie in it, but he can’t quite get there.

“Oh man,” Richie says. He grins a little, but his eyes are focused on Eddie’s face. He brings up the scissors next to Eddie’s face, but the points are still visible in Eddie’s peripheral vision—not about to strike. “So fucking confused, dude. It’s not eyeliner like people wear now, it’s like—full on war movie camo paint stripe-across-the-face eyeliner. I watched it and I was like, _Is Eva Green hot? Or am I sexually attracted to raccoons?_ ” And on that baffling note, he asks, “Ready?”

Eddie blinks several times at the questions Richie has just posed. The obvious response is _What the fuck?_ but he suspects opening his mouth too wide at this juncture is not ideal. “Yeah,” he says, almost absently.

Richie tilts his head a little further to the side—it’s not exactly comfortable. Eddie thinks he feels a phantom of tension, and then the cold dampness of the scissors on his skin—which is probably psychosomatic, as he doubts he has that much sensation in what is probably new scar tissue—and then Richie cuts the first stitch.

There’s something satisfying about the sound, Eddie has always thought. The way that the scissors bite through every little fiber in the thread one after another, and so the resulting slice is almost rounded to the ear. He jumps a little, it’s so loud in the room—just rocking forward towards Richie onto the balls of his feet and then catching himself. “Oh,” he says, settling back down.

Richie’s eyebrows lift. “You good?” he asks.

He hangs onto the countertop more aggressively, since now he apparently has to hold himself down. “Yeah, fine,” he says. He wants to shake his head to clear it, but Richie’s still resting the points of a blade, however small, against his face. “Is Eva Green hot?”

Now Richie shakes his head a little as though baffled. “What?”

“Well, you asked,” Eddie says, he thinks very reasonably. “I mean—if it’s the raccoons, sometimes there are, like, these conventions in the city. I don’t know what those people get up to, it’s very colorful, I don’t get it, but I think it’s a lot easier for my imagination to grasp Eva Green being hot. Like, that’s more accessible to me.”

Richie seems to realize what he’s doing, because he smiles a little, in an open-mouthed kind of way that seems to suggest he finds Eddie endearing. “Two,” he warns, and Eddie closes his mouth and holds still and waits as Richie snips through the second stitch. “I mean, I guess,” he answers Eddie’s question. “They made her a Bond girl the year after that came out, so the general consensus was probably in favor.”

“So,” Eddie says, barely moving his mouth, but Richie is watching his eyes again and not looking at his stitches. “So it was just the eyeliner? Or?”

Richie grins but there’s a sort of edge to it too. “What do you want to hear, Eds?”

Eddie shrugs a little and averts his eyes. “I don’t—I’m not looking for anything specifically—God knows it’s fucking impossible to get a straight answer out of—no that’s _not_ what I meant,” he says in response to Richie’s sudden bright grin, his teeth.

“Ready?” Richie asks again, and his palm cups Eddie’s jaw so perfectly that Eddie almost shudders. His eyes are on Eddie’s cheek again instead of his face when he says quietly, “Don’t you think—that if I could find Eva Green hot, that that would solve my problem? Three.” He snips through the stitch and Eddie doesn’t move his face, but his shoulders jerk up to his ears.

“Problem?” he repeats. He might be new to the whole, uh, _identifying_ as gay thing, but he’s pretty sure that he doesn’t want to think of his sexuality as a _problem_ anymore. He doesn’t really want Richie to, either.

“Of being _super_ fucking closeted in Hollywood,” Richie says. “I would love not to have to wait for the Bond franchise to tell me what’s attractive about women. If I could have, like, used Eva Green for a template and gotten, like, super into Medieval Jerusalem play—which, like, I don’t even know what that would be, but I’m pretty sure it would be offensive to three major religions at least, and upset both my parents—like, _that_ I could talk about. Plausibly. It could happen.”

Eddie kind of feels the cold now. “Oh,” he says. He swallows. “So you wish—wish you didn’t, uh. Feel. That. About. Uh.”

Richie’s eyes widen in a different way, his black eyelashes flicking up dramatically. “That’s not what I meant,” he says. “Fuck. No, I—” He tilts his head to the side momentarily, like the weight of having to explain is laborious. “I don’t—wish you were a woman, or anything. I like you how you are. And I don’t want to be with women. It’s not—it’s why I hired writers.”

Eddie bites at his lower lip a little. “What’s why you hired writers?”

“I—” Richie seems to look around at nothing again. “There’s an audience, and things an audience wants to hear, and things that sell, and things that don’t. I mean—on top of how fucking impossible it would be to—like, maybe when I was a kid I used to sit up and pray that I wasn’t gay. That happened a couple of times.”

Eddie blinks. “You _prayed_?”

“Yeah, it was weird, He never got back to me,” Richie says, blasé. “That’s not the point. I just—I never wanted to have the conversation with Went and Maggie, you know? I didn’t want to have to tell them that I’d never bring a girl home, and I didn’t want to have to—like, I spent most of the time convinced that I was gonna get murdered by a human, all right? Like all the other closeted queer kids did back in the eighties.” He shrugs as though in surrender to the universality of the experience.

That… Eddie never really entered God into his internal conversations. He prayed to be strong, and he prayed to _make his mother see_ and he prayed that he wouldn’t get sick, and at some point the _please don’t let me get sick_ turned into things that he was in control of, preventative behaviors he could dispense reliably with his own hands instead of waiting for them on high. Sometimes scrubbing things down was a little bit like playing god, wiping out whole colonies of bacteria—colonies, again—from on high with a flood of Lysol, of lemon juice, of good old soap and water.

But Eddie thought very little about what people saw on him from the outside. Probably because looking at himself from the outside would mean having to come to a few uncomfortable truths a little early, but he was almost always aware that something he was doing was wrong, he just had no idea what it was, and eventually his mother told him that it was because he was being dirty, or unsafe, or unhealthy, or doing something dangerous, and he accepted that, and chalked it all up into the _disease_ inside him. He could treat it. Sure. Why not? His mother insisted it was possible, and since she was the one who told him it was there, he had to trust her judgment.

“And then when I got to LA—like, _less_ people get murdered for that than in fucking Maine, I _guess_ , but like—I couldn’t get past that. If I could have—” The fingers of his left hand flare out in gesture. “—if I could have convinced myself I felt anything for a woman—”

“Fuck you,” Eddie replies almost habitually. "And it's _fewer_ people."

Richie snorts. “Okay, okay. I just mean—I never would have gotten… just fucking horny enough to do anything with men. If I thought there was any other way for me, I would have talked myself into that, and never acknowledged the fucking rainbow elephant in the room.”

Eddie blinks at him. “That’s not what I did.”

“I _know_ that’s not what you did,” Richie says. “I’m not trying to be like _you took the easy way out_.” He shudders a little, almost performatively. “I’m not like you, I’m not brave, I’m still a little fucking weasel on the inside, is all.”

“Shut the fuck up,” Eddie says. It doesn’t come out the way it normally would, thrown at Richie to stop the line of conversation or incite him into keeping going. Instead it comes out shaped differently, meant to make Richie listen to him. “You’re not a weasel,” he says, because the very idea offends him. “You’re… a dramatic bitch, but you’re not a weasel. I saw you, with It.”

Richie rolls his eyes.

“No, shut up,” Eddie says, though he didn’t actually say anything. He thinks he has a bit of the advantage here, because he saw Richie in a life or death situation, and most people don’t get to do that, or they never have to confront it the way _they_ had to confront _It_ , it just happens fast and accidental and ordinary. But Eddie remembers how he felt when he realized he could die, and what he did; and he remembers when he _couldn’t_ remember what he felt and what he did in those moments, and. He knows which one is the real him, is all. Was the real him all along.

So he knows the real Richie. Angry enough at Bill to leave him on the hook about whether or not they were going to _leave him to die_ , but fucking loyal enough to grab a bat and take a swing at a monster, instead of walking away. Protective enough to try and get Its attention—what he always did when he was out of his depth, grab for the attention of the whole room—and stupid enough to yell _you’re a sloppy bitch, let’s dance_ at It.

“You carried me out,” Eddie says. “I remember that.”

Richie’s shoulders fall as though he’s disappointed and his eyes close for a moment. “Okay, but that’s not, like, an act of bravery, that was—”

“You could have left me there.”

“No, I couldn’t.”

“The place was coming down around us, you could have left me there—”

“ _No,_ I couldn’t,” Richie snaps back, more vehement than Eddie expected.

Eddie gives him a cool look and shrugs in response. “A weasel would have.”

Richie looks at him for a long moment, blinking slowly and theatrically. “Well, that’s a relief,” he says, voice broad and sardonic. “Glad we got that settled. It’s a tough life, being a weasel attracted to raccoons.”

Eddie stares at him for several seconds and then lets him see the actual genuine exasperation and anger that makes him feel, in slow motion, mouth open, eyes rolling at the sheer _audacity_. “Jesus fucking Christ.”

“Yeah, yeah, we’ve hit my emotional capacity for the day,” Richie says. “Go back to being turned on by me holding sharp objects close to your eyes, that was more fun. Four.”

“I—!” The very suggestion makes Eddie flush, but he buttons his lower lip and stares at the wall behind Richie’s head, mortified.

Richie cuts through the fourth stitch in short order, grinning, no doubt at having shut Eddie up. “Really? Because that’s what it looked like from where I’m standing. Five.”

He’s doing this just so that Eddie can’t respond. Eddie lets his nostrils flare in fury and glares daggers at Richie while he grins wider and takes his sweet time cutting the last stitch. As soon as he hears the swipe of the blades over each other he snaps back, “Looked like _what_?”

Richie tosses the tiny scissors—fucking comically small, actually, now that Eddie has the range of vision to compare the size of Richie’s hand to them—into the sink with a clatter. “Looked like begging for it to me,” he teases, voice dropping low, and he actually laughs and puts up both hands to block when Eddie slaps at him with his fucking numb arm.

“Fuck you,” Eddie says. “I didn’t even say anything, you’re making shit up, _you’re_ a dick.”

“Uh-huh,” Richie agrees, and steps very quickly into Eddie’s space again, turning him so his back is to the counter again. Eddie blinks, startled a little, and does not understand what’s happening while Richie smooths his hands from Eddie’s elbows down to his forearms, until he covers both Eddie’s hands with his own and presses them flat to the counter. Then he taps at the instep of Eddie’s bare foot until Eddie gets the hint and moves it aside, and Richie steps carefully into the space.

“This is weird,” Eddie says, not to shut him down but to get a word in before Richie cuts him off again. “Like, that was a lot just there, it’s not exactly sweet talk.”

“You want sweet talk?” Richie asks, eyes glittering with the tease as he leans down. “I think you’re Bond-girl hot, baby.”

Eddie’s stomach tightens at the word, and he jumps a little and knows Richie can feel it where he’s standing between Eddie’s knees and holding his hands down. And then Richie leans in and—doesn’t kiss him. Just grins at him, almost cross-eyed from proximity.

“You literally _just said_ you’re not into Bond girls,” Eddie protests.

“I would watch you make out with Daniel Craig,” Richie says. “That would do it for me.”

Eddie groans, loud and _done_. “Stop talking,” he says, and leans up to kiss the smirk off his dumb face.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yeah, I actually hadn't decided on Richie's sexuality re: bi or gay despite people asking, but then the Eva Green conversation happened and I was like *shrugs* show me the way, fic characters. Anyway, I've already stated my opinion on the topic (tumblr) and don't have anything new to add. As always, you can find me on twitter @IfItHollers or on tumblr at tthael. Thank you for reading!


	17. You Are Safe

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Eddie's self-guided research in medicine, history, and Richie studies.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I really thought that the vibe for this chapter would be very different from what ended up happening but I've learned by now that I have to roll with it when the characters grab the wheel. On the plus side, this helps walk me into more actual structure than I had outlined for Eddie's three-week recovery between doctor's visits.
> 
> Content warnings for this chapter: BIG ONES. 1) Eddie investigates what he knows about leprosy and HIV/AIDS, trying to unpack some of his baggage. Lots of thoughts about misconceptions in the way that HIV is transmitted, about bigotry towards people with HIV, about Eddie's anxieties growing up during the AIDS crisis. Eddie is not perfect at identifying and analyzing his own biases here, and I'm not trying to write either a) a comprehensive overview of why HIV/AIDS stigma/discrimination is wrong or b) "Eddie learns some facts and his phobias are magically cured." This is a process. If you want to skip that section, jump from "It turns out that he knows far less about HIV and AIDS than he thought he did" to "The CDC website has parentheticals"!
> 
> 2) Eddie explicitly compares microaggressive bigoted behavior which he's accustomed to being backed by institutions (in this case, fear of contamination and HIV transmission) to what he considers unacceptable and overtly aggressive bigoted behavior (in this case, refusal to shake a black person's hand). The goal here is not to compare forms of discrimination. We're not using racism as a metaphor here or trying to quantify suffering. Instead Eddie's trying to personalize a larger concept of discrimination and make it relevant to his own experience, and weighing how he contributes to the problem. Again, if that's going to be upsetting for you, you can jump from "It turns out that he knows far less about HIV and AIDS than he thought he did" to "The CDC website has parentheticals"!
> 
> Other content warnings: Eddie's a little classist about his upbringing; countercultural movements; Richie's Muppet fascination; Eddie's not actually going to punch Richie; leprosy stigma; externalized and internalized homophobia; Pennywise is "surprisingly homophobic"; Eddie's religious leanings are unexplored but inform his narrative; discussion of Eddie's pill dependence; Eddie's encounter with It is recounted in detail; Richie uses a slur that I will not type; body- and self-image issues.
> 
> Sorry for the super long chapter note but, like--I'm not just fucking around here, guys.

Richie comes back from the store carrying—among his regular purchases of Skittles, which Eddie has watched him tear open and pour down his throat in an impressive but alarming display, and antibacterial Dial hand soap for Eddie’s wounds—a box. It’s cardboard and smooth and has the sort of unfinished corrugated edges that Eddie associates with the 1980s, which means that he associates it with growing up poor, which means that ordinarily he would turn up his nose at it. Richie removes the box from the plastic bag and holds it up over his head like a boombox.

“For your grooming _pleasure_ —” He gives a sort of dramatic bow as he pulls lasciviously on the last word, which is unsurprising. “—one hair and beard trimmer, freshly purchased, has never touched anyone’s dick, and was not provided through Amazon. You are safe.” He makes a show of placing it on the counter.

Eddie blushes a little.

The trimmer was not so much Richie’s idea as that he was the inspiration for it. To Eddie’s surprise, Richie actually has a routine, something Eddie would not have thought possible because he knew him as a teenager. Eddie gets up, rinses clean, puts on Ben’s clothes, and goes out for his walk. Richie gets up and, by the time Eddie comes out of the shower, he’s in the kitchen with his coffee. Then while Eddie hobbles around the property, Richie showers, brushes his teeth, and trims his stubble to a uniform level of scruff. Eddie observed idly that Richie’s facial hair looked good, looked _consistent_ , but somehow he didn’t realize that Richie might be working to maintain that until he caught him in the act.

He came back in from his walk, his fingers frozen, and found Richie in the bathroom with his chin pushed out like Pop-Eye, carefully guiding a buzzing black device over his face.

Wearing a towel.

Just a towel.

“Oh my god,” Eddie said, staring at Richie’s broad pale back, his calves under the generous bath sheets Ben provided—thank you, Ben, and also _fuck you_ , Ben. Black hair marbled across Richie’s back and shoulders, and Eddie curled his numb and aching fingers into fists in his pockets out of fear that he was going to _touch_.

Then he raised his gaze to Richie’s face to find him watching him in the mirror. His eyes are very round and black, the wall lighting throwing his face into extremes. White face, dark hair, dark stubble not quite qualifying as a beard, white towel, fucking _wide_ shoulders. The edge of the towel was rumpled instead of cleanly folded, like Richie did it in a hurry instead of taking his time.

_This is it,_ Eddie thought to himself, very clearly. _This is what you like in a man, and one man in particular._ The fact that he was thinking it while Richie was both smirking at him and filling the sink with tiny fragments of hairs that he had no intention of cleaning up when he was done said a lot about Eddie’s baseline these days. And why was it taking Richie so long to get ready, when usually Eddie came in from his walk and found him dressed and waiting with food and ready to lie on the couch wrapped around Eddie like a giant squid?

Eddie swallowed a little and tried to put some of his _need_ back in a box, where it could do no harm. They have not talk about the medical restriction— _no sex_ —since Eddie blurted it out in a panic. Maybe they should? Eddie doesn’t know. Instead he focused on what he thought was an acceptable thing to stare at—the realization that Richie’s general air of dishevelment is cultivated, that he _chooses_ to look like this—and said with great condemnation, “You fucking hipster.”

Richie’s slow smile indicated that he was not completely successful. He relaxed his jaw and his lower lip reappeared, almost bright pink against his overexposed face. “If you can correctly define ‘hipster’ for me, right now, in the next thirty seconds, I’ll shave it all off.” He rubbed at his face with his fingertips. “Clean-cut, smooth criminal on this motherfucker, come on, Eddie.”

Eddie blushed then too, at the mental image of Richie bare-faced, though he couldn’t say why. The idea was interesting, in a way. Maybe he just doesn’t think of Richie as vulnerable, as soft-faced. All that skin…

He kept his eyes firmly above Richie’s shoulders. Well. Almost firmly.

He likes Richie… how he is. Not messy, but… rough. Maybe he’d like to see him polished as well. Taking the extra time, taking care of himself. And if Eddie didn’t like it—well, it would be an easy fix, to mess him up again. The stubble would grow back out.

“Your glasses,” Eddie said, struggling to remember what he knows about hipsters. He lives in New York, and they’ve been around for at least a decade, but he also knows that Richie’s a little bit outside the general age bracket.

“What about them,” Richie replied, matching his _j’accuse_ tone in all its intensity. His eyes glittered like they did at the restaurant, happy to go back and forth with the _fuck you!_

Eddie knows a hipster when he sees one, okay? It was just a little hard to think there, in the moment, with the great well down Richie’s back on display, the softness of the skin just above his hips half-cradled by—not terrycloth, but whatever the hell Ben’s towels are made of. The whole room smelled damp and clean and sweet with lingering steam.

“Coffee,” Eddie managed, listing the other thing he knows about hipsters.

Richie made a buzzer noise. It was very irritating, and dissonant with the note at which his trimmer vibrated. “Eh, sorry, babe, that’s not the hipster shit, that’s the ADHD—but thanks for playing.” He smiled and Eddie saw the white gleam of his teeth up against his pink mouth. “And I’m only drinking the good shit because Ben has it. Don’t mistake me for someone with standards.”

And he went back to shaving off teeny tiny bits of hair, filling the sink with little fibers like those old Pirate Pete magnet boards full of iron filaments. Eddie had seen them in the sink before, sometimes wet with a cursory attempt at washing them down the drain, but he and Richie wordlessly came to an accord about which sink they each used, and so it hadn’t interfered with his life much. Only on his worst days, when he was anxious about anything even in the vicinity of his wounds and bandages, did the hair in the sink set him to spiraling.

Eddie watched Richie for a little bit, tucking his upper lip down to trim under his nose, pulling a face the closer he got to his nostrils. It was objectively very funny looking, but Eddie watched without amusement so much as… pleasure. He might not have been invited to come in and watch Richie through his morning routine, but he might be in the future. Richie left the door open, knowing he’d come in after all.

And Eddie thinks that a trimmer is a great idea. He doesn’t necessarily have a fear of sharp objects, but he’s more than a little afraid that one will present itself without warning—that he’ll try to put a razor to his face and suddenly find his hands trembling too fiercely to hold it. That Bowers will break him. It’s one thing to trust Richie to guide tiny scissors to his cheek with steady hands; it’s another for Eddie to take his already-taxed body and mind and put them to the test.

But he doesn’t have the excuse of the stitches to avoid it anymore, and the beard is slowly driving him insane. It itches. It tickles. He constantly feels like someone’s waving a feather under his nose. Under the hair there are dry flaky patches of skin and painful hard bumps—ingrown hairs or pimples or cysts. He doesn’t know. He can’t apply moisturizer correctly there, and he doesn’t have a proper beard wash.

“I feel like a _beatnik_ ,” he complained, because it was easier than either announcing he had adult acne or looking at Richie, naked except for the towel, and announcing _I feel fucking insane_. Acne’s an immune response. He’s not sick, or dirty. He remembers Richie stroking his cheek in the hospital, saying something like, _Oh, you are breaking out, I didn’t notice_.

Richie laughed again. “I’m starting to think you just don’t understand countercultural movements.”

Eddie ignored that and watched Richie shake hair off the blade. “Have you ever cut yourself with that thing?”

Instead of answering verbally, Richie did the theatrical and frightening thing and held the blade end of the trimmer to the heel of his hand. Eddie had a moment of alarm, then realization, then exasperation, and Richie watched him in the mirror impassively as he cycled from wide eyes to a glare.

“Tickles,” Richie said easily, and went back to shaving.

Even if the trimmer can’t provide a close shave, less hair on Eddie’s face would definitely be a move in the right direction. He has some nerves about shaving off his dirty beatnik beard and revealing his bad skin, but at least that’s something he can do. He can clean. He can groom. He can trim. He can maintain.

There was just question standing in the way of his asking Richie if he could borrow it.

“Yes, of _course_ I’ve used it on my dick,” Richie said.

He held it to his face without a trace of disgust, but the tucked-in corner of his mouth said that he was enjoying Eddie’s horrified expression. Eddie thought about sterilization, about barbasol, about Ben’s 192-proof vodka downstairs on the bar again, about Richie rubbing his mouth and jaw all over Eddie’s face and throat. A month ago, even that indirect contact would have revolted him. Instead he reeled in the empty space where disgust was absent again, wondering why the fuck Richie wasn’t gross when he did such gross things.

“It vibrates, obviously I tried it at least once,” Richie said, returning his focus to his own reflection. That was more baffling. Richie said _at least once_ but he didn’t say _and now it’s part of my daily routine, that’s what I did while you were outside dragging your feet around Ben’s running path_ , and he didn’t say anything about the _extent_ of such ministrations. Any speculation on that front was completely Eddie’s; and he’s never found a slick of short shaved hairs in the bottom of the shower, just the longer stray ones from (presumably!) Richie’s head.

So Eddie doesn’t really need more details than that. Really, he doesn’t. He hasn’t thought about it at all since the conversation, and he doesn’t listen for the shower running every time he steps into the house after his walk. That’s Richie’s business and Eddie doesn’t think about it. And oh, here is Richie, fresh from the drugstore with a new hair and beard trimmer, which Eddie will be using exclusively on his face.

For the foreseeable future, anyway. If there’s ever a time when he might want to revisit the _hair_ situation as opposed to just the _beard_ situation—well, there will be time for that in the future. That’s not something he has to worry about right now.

He takes his new trimmer out to the living room so he can sit while he unboxes it. There’s a black plastic kit inside, and assorted guards of different lengths, looking like combs of varying thicknesses. Two cut at a diagonal slant are marked RIGHT EAR and LEFT EAR respectively, tapering in different directions. Eddie spares a glance over at Richie—who is unpacking the rest of their purchases and appearing and reappearing at the counter to put them away—and squints as he tries to see what’s going on with Richie’s sideburns. Not that he’s a model for facial hair or anything, he just hasn’t really thought about it. At this distance and with Richie walking around, it’s too difficult to tell.

He takes out the user’s manual and begins quietly reading it. It is slow going. Sometimes his eyes slide in different directions off the lines of text, and he has to stop himself and try to think back to the last thing he comprehended, and find it on the page, and start over again.

“Hey, Eds?” Richie asks.

Eddie says, “Mnuh?” and lifts his listing head, aware that he nodded off for a little bit there. This is a hazard of being drugged all the time, but feels far more excusable when he’s lying down on the couch with the TV running, or actively intending to take a nap. It’s been maybe twenty minutes since he took his painkillers.

Richie is standing maybe a yard away from him, hands in the pockets of his new leather jacket. He nods to the open box still on Eddie’s lap. “You wanna watch your plastic there?” he asks.

Eddie blinks a couple of times, trying and failing to clear his head. Then he looks down at the box. All of the little guards have slid right to the edge of their box, which is tilting more dangerously with their weight now. He moves the box to the coffee table and then neatly folds up the pamphlet. He sets that down beside the box and admires the arrangement for a moment, satisfied by the neatness of it, and then slowly lies down on his left side to curl up on the couch.

Right before he falls truly asleep he lurches awake and aware for reasons he’s unsure of. He rolls onto his back and says, “Richie?”

“Yeah?” His answering voice is less close by, but when he’s this tired Eddie’s directional hearing is a little weird.

“Come here,” he demands.

Richie appears from the hallway and Eddie twists up—ow—and gestures at the spot on the couch where he wants Richie to sit. Richie smiles a little, definitely amused, but he cooperates. Eddie immediately lowers his head to rest on Richie’s thighs.

“Yeah, I figured that’s what you were getting at,” Richie says, voice warm.

Eddie rocks his head back and forth a little to hear his beard scrape across the denim of Richie’s jeans. They’re fashionably faded at the thigh, and Eddie isn’t sure if this is how Richie buys them or if he just wears his clothes hard, if he does his fidgety thing wiping his hands on his pants.

“All right, hang on,” Richie says. “I can’t sit like this—do _not_ move.” He holds Eddie’s head gently in both hands, shifting and turning so his back is to the arm of the couch. Eddie allows himself to be pliant, to put all the weight of his head into Richie’s hands without complaint, without holding anything back.

Then the next thing he knows, one of Richie’s legs swings right over his head to rest behind him on the couch.

Only being dead weight stops him from jolting upright and hurting himself. “What the _fuck_?” Eddie demands.

Richie folds his other leg up to make a figure four of his lap and shifts, adjusting his weight. Then he drops Eddie’s head back onto his thigh, far less careful than he was taking hold of his skull in the first place. Bent like this, muscle and fat push up against his calf and feel larger, soft and squishy. He makes a better pillow.

Eddie remains baffled, wondering if he really just saw that. “What the hell was that?” he demands. “Are you secretly a cheerleader? Have you been replaced by Christine Baranski?”

Richie’s fingers push through Eddie’s hair, because he knows how much Eddie likes that and he _still_ plays dirty, after all these years. “How did you think you were straight, dude?” he asks, laughing.

Eddie’s not over the high kick. He punches him in the calf. “You fucking showoff,” he says, and it takes him twice as long to nod off again, aided by Richie petting at his head with his free hand.

Some indeterminate time later, Eddie wakes and realizes that he’s lying between Richie’s legs, which are not exactly spread, but definitely comfortably crossed.

His dick is right there. With the angle he’s lying at, he can’t see it, but he _knows_ it’s there.

Also Richie is humming to himself, his eyes on his phone. Eddie listens for long moments, but Richie’s not humming a whole song, he’s humming part of a song, which is definitely just the part stuck in his head. Eddie can’t identify it. Richie does like one line and then later hums the same line again, and it’s not enough for Eddie to make anything of it.

He hasn’t asked much about what Richie does when Eddie goes off to do his exercises. Part of him is full of curiosity almost like hunger, wanting to watch him, wanting to see what he does with a nature documentary-like voyeuristic quality. Then he imagines Richie turning to him and demanding _“What?”_ from him, the way that having eyes on him always hypes him up higher, the way that Richie is and always has been a bit of a showoff.

He can’t decide if this longing to quietly observe is normal, or if it’s a legacy of Sonia Kaspbrak’s need for control. He isn’t sure what he wants to do with the things that Richie does when he’s alone, if just knowing them would be enough or if he’d need more. They say that you should never ask a question if you can’t handle the answer, but Eddie’s always been bad at that. He needs to know things.

The irony, huh?

He wonders if Richie knows that he’s awake. If the humming is like mouthing words to himself in the hospital, acting something out, or with his headphones in talking to himself in the living room. He knows that some of Richie’s job requires writing, and he remembers how talking to Richie at seven years old meant listening to him play with every new word or phrase like it was a new toy. He still does it sometimes when they watch TV: he’ll repeat a line on the show if it was funny or if he liked the delivery. Like homework. Like learning from it. Then he smiles to himself.

Is that the fucking _“Rainbow Connection”?_

“What is it with you and Kermit?” Eddie asks. His voice comes out bleary and slurred.

Richie’s thigh twitches, but otherwise he sits like a rock. “I don’t know,” he replies, “but whatever it is, it’s extremely sexual.”

Eddie snorts and sits up slowly, trying not to overtax the blood in his brain. “What time is it?” he asks, because he’s figured out by now that if he asks Richie _How long did I sleep?_ Richie has no idea. His estimations of the passage of time are frequently wildly inaccurate.

“Two-oh-eight PM,” he reports precisely, seeming almost pleased by the specificity of it.

Eddie groans. So he was out for a full REM cycle.

Richie unbends the leg that Eddie was sleeping on, gritting his teeth and screwing up his face as he stretches the knee. “Oh, that hurts,” he mumbles, apparently unaffected by Eddie just sitting between his spread legs.

Eddie flushes for more than one reason. “You could have moved me,” he says.

“I didn’t notice until now,” he says. “Didn’t have pins and needles or anything.”

Richie considers him for a long moment, his bare foot extended in the air between couch and coffee table, and then sets the leg in Eddie’s lap. This seems only fair, so Eddie loops both arms around it like it’s a log of firewood and holds him secure. Richie snorts a little but also grins.

“What did you do while I slept for like an hour and a half?”

“Solitaire.”

Eddie, thinking idly of tension in his own calves, how tight they are when he wakes up in the mornings, kneads gently at Richie’s leg.

Richie laughs. “Are you punching me?”

“When I punch you, you’ll know,” Eddie says flatly.

Richie’s eyebrows waggle. “Not _if_ but _when_. Be still my beating meat.”

Eddie flings Richie’s leg off his lap and watches Richie lurch to stay upright without tearing a hamstring or something. “God _damn_ it, Richie!”

* * *

But part of him wants to know what Richie is up to because Eddie is bored. Eddie is bored, but he is impeded by his own body in a way that fills his time with regular naps and with hourly breathing and coughing exercises and time with the incentive spirometer. But he’s very aware that Richie is easily bored, and that Richie has no such limitations, and that Richie has not complained to him about it even once.

If Eddie were to try to answer the question _What am I afraid of?_ he thinks it’s being like his mother. He’s afraid of Richie wanting to leave but staying to placate him. He has to remind himself that he’s never known Richie to bottle up his feelings or to hold back his grievances, so where is this fear coming from? It has to be Sonia, right?

Eddie uses the trimmer on his face in the bathroom, leaning as far forward as he can without upsetting his chest injuries too greatly. It’s kind of fun to watch his face appear slowly from behind the beatnik beard. Like he has a moment of _oh, there you are_ with his own reflection. He washes his face and applies toner and moisturizer, and it feels far more effective than previous attempts at washing his face. He walks out of the bathroom feeling like himself again.

Well, for a certain value of himself. The new himself. The one he missed, over the years.

“Are you bored?” he asks Richie.

Richie is sitting in an armchair with both legs hooked over the side, frowning at something on his phone. He looks up when Eddie comes in and then grins. “Smooth Eds,” he coos. “Look at your little face.”

Eddie’s shoulders hike up as he resists the urge to cover his own face with his hands. “Why are you like this?” he groans.

“We’re going steady, I thought I was supposed to give you compliments,” Richie says, broad teasing grin still in place.

“‘Little face’ is not a compliment,” Eddie says.

“Your sexy, sexy face,” Richie says just as flippantly.

Eddie grimaces, embarrassed now in a different way. “Better,” he allows. “I’m bored. Let’s do something.”

They end up playing poker at one of Ben’s tiny tables. They have no chips, so Richie dumps out a whole bag of Skittles and starts assigning them value: “One, five, ten, fifty, and one hundred,” he says.

Eddie frowns. “The green ones should be one.”

Richie obediently rearranges them so that green Skittles are worth one, lemon are worth five, orange are worth ten, and then they get into a fight about whether purple Skittles or red Skittles are better. Eddie is vehemently in favor of purple Skittles. He realizes about halfway through that Richie has chosen to back the red Skittles just to oppose him, just to wind him up, and then they bicker harder. They stop only when Richie starts shuffling—as the only one with more than seven working and reliable fingers, he’s the default dealer—and Eddie gets extremely fucking distracted by his hands. Richie deals his cards with almost elegant little flicks of his fingers and Eddie pauses in the process of organizing his Skittles in order of value.

“Your meds kicking in there, Eddie?” Richie asks. When Eddie looks up at him, he’s smirking a little.

“Fuck you,” Eddie says. “Let’s fucking play.” He gathers up his cards.

Eddie, who has not attempted to play poker since he was very young, out in the Barrens sitting in a square with Bill, Stan, and Richie, turns out to be a mediocre player at best. This enrages him. Richie is astonishingly good at poker, and keeps humming “The Gambler” under his breath as he steals Eddie’s Skittles off to his pile, which inexplicably never seems to become bigger.

“Wait,” Eddie says, frowning at the pot. “Where are—are you eating them?” he asks.

Richie sticks his tongue out and shows Eddie a Skittle sucked white balanced on the end of his tongue.

Eddie is momentarily overcome by imagining a world in which Richie Tozier actually eats plastic poker chips, and has to hold his ribs and giggle.

* * *

He doesn’t ask Richie to sleep in his bed with him. A couch is one thing—it’s not that Eddie thinks that nothing could ever happen on a couch, but he can’t stand the idea of taking off his clothes and putting on his pajamas in front of Richie, with the knowledge that Richie would be doing the same thing beside him. Or not putting on pajamas, which would be infinitely worse. And he doesn’t sleep the night through anyway—thanks to his frequent opioid naps, his early rising, his physical activity, and his weird mealtimes, he spends long periods of time awake.

Thinking.

Sometimes he’s tempted to get up and wander the house like a creep. He excuses that by telling himself he’s going to check that all of the blinds are drawn on the windows, which has the effect of giving Ben’s house walls again. Blue light leaks in around the edges, so Eddie can tell how late or early it is. He goes to the bathroom and while he’s washing his hands in the mirror, he thinks that he likes his face best at night. He knows that humans are not at their best immediately after sleep, but he always wakes a little flushed, sometimes with night sweats. At night he looks pale, but in a way that doesn’t call attention to the bags under his eyes, or the livid spots on his chin. He looks at his face, predominated by eyes and brows, and thinks, _This is me._ Not _this is my face_. _This is me._ Just for practice.

Other nights he tells himself that if he doesn’t need to use the toilet he has to stay in his bed. He doesn’t know why. Maybe he has visions of Richie staggering out in the morning to find Eddie already lurking over a cup of hot chocolate. That’s one of their unspoken rules—Eddie goes to bed first, but once Richie goes to his room, he stays in the room. They’ve never run into each other in the kitchen or hallway before, after the agreed-upon bedtime.

So he stays in his bed like a child waiting for morning, unable to sleep and, fortunately, having a tiny computer close to hand. He knows that screens are bad for circadian rhythms, that blue light is probably actively deteriorating his already-suspect eyesight. He can’t help it, though—and honestly he doesn’t want to help it. It’s not insomnia, it’s just being too well-rested to sleep at the prescribed hours, and he’s bored, and he can’t be left alone with his thoughts.

Instead he researches.

Sometimes it’s leprosy. He’s still puzzled by that odd association of the _single_ leprosy patient, instead of the colony Richie jumped to immediately. He wonders if forming a crowd was beyond It, or if It knew that Eddie would be most afraid of a single man, a single temptation instead of a whole world condemning him.

Why was he so afraid of being alone? All his life he has known that some people are excluded. Not even through fault of their own—what did Bev ever do, except have people look at her for being poor, being pretty, being wild? And by the time that Eddie realized that at school he was treated differently—well, he had Bill Denbrough and Stan Uris and Richie Tozier, and if they weren’t winning any popularity contests, he never felt the loss.

There are so many things he either never noticed about himself or strictly instructed himself not to notice about his body and the things he liked and the things he wanted, and the root of that was from Sonia. His whole life. And at ten, what could he have possibly done to make his mother think he was gay? All of his friends were boys, but he hardly knew any other ten-year-olds paling around with the girls in his class—you didn’t want to be that kind of boy, because people suspected how at ease a boy like that was with girls, Eddie knew that. But his mother wasn’t happy with him paling around with the boys either. His mother wanted him at home and all to herself, and there was nothing Eddie could have said or done to change that.

His mother never saw reality. He was never delicate, he never had asthma. She saw her own fear, and tried to shape him to it. And for a long time—a time Eddie is still ashamed of—it worked.

So Eddie, at night, with his phone that Ben brought to him in Ben’s house with Ben’s spider plant slowly resurrecting on his dresser, looks into the face of fear.

Calling it research is generous. It’s mostly crawling Wikipedia. It turns out that Richie was right about the name of that king of Jerusalem, and that he actually had leprosy, though Eddie frowns while trying to figure out who Eva Green played since this king was unmarried. He learns about a Victorian-era British nurse who traveled the world searching for a cure for leprosy—but her quest, though seemingly altruistic, was plagued by rumors that she was only undertaking it as penance for her sin of homosexuality. Eddie finds very little detail of Kate Marsden, Victorian lesbian’s romantic relationships on her Wikipedia page. He’s a little surprised that it was so widely known while she was alive. He tries to imagine being out in a time like that, when homosexuality was so universally hated. He can’t even imagine being out before the AIDS crisis. But apparently Kate Marsden had the blessing of Queen Victoria herself.

Well, fancy that.

There are pages for stigma against leprosy specifically. Apparently Japan treated leprosy completely differently from the United States—both countries have a National Hansen’s Disease Museum, and the American one is in Carville, Louisiana, which is famous for its history as being a region for leprosy quarantine. Eddie thinks about his dazed conversation with Mike in which they made plans to go on a roadtrip. Would Mike go to Louisiana with him? It’s close to Florida, right? And close to Stan in Georgia, too. Mike lived in a library for decades; Mike would probably go to this museum with him without asking too many questions.

Leprosy is now called Hansen’s disease, after a doctor who identified a certain kind of bacteria that causes it. It hasn’t been eradicated, but it can be treated through drug courses. Eddie looks at the images of skin lesions with a kind of dispassionate interest, and he knows that his brain is saving the images of red welts, of white patches, and will look for them on his body for the rest of his life—but he also knows that the likelihood of finding them is low. The Leprosy Mission International hopes to have eradicated leprosy by 2035. Less than twenty years! And isn’t that something.

And the United Nations has addressed the issue of stigma against leprosy persisting in popular culture. There’s a movement called “Delete the L Word/Don’t Call Me a Leper.” It reminds Eddie of those TV commercials asking teenagers to stop using “gay” as a synonym for “stupid”; he remembers seeing Wanda Sykes on his TV and feeling inexplicably uncomfortable and scrutinized, but then he tended to remind himself that TV is bad for him anyway, and turn off whatever he was watching and go clean something. Now he wants to roll his eyes at himself at the memory. But there’s an active movement against using leprosy or the word “leper” as a synonym for a social pariah. A United Nations spokesperson made a statement condemning politicians using such figurative language in their campaign speeches: “The use of leprosy as a pejorative metaphor derives from long-lasting stigmatising connotations produced by different cultural traditions, social rules, and legal frameworks… Using it as a metaphor leads to wrongful stereotyping that fuels public stigma, everyday discrimination, and impairs the enjoyment of human rights and fundamental freedoms by persons affected and their families.”

It doesn’t exactly surprise Eddie that Pennywise was not a beacon of political correctness, but the idea does amuse him enough that he has to put his phone down and giggle a little hysterically into his pillow.

It turns out that Eddie’s brain responds far better to making contingencies— _if I have leprosy, then I will find out in time and be treated_ —than to flatly telling himself that he doesn’t have leprosy. He’s probably more surprised by this than he should be. But it makes sense that having a cause-and-effect lined up for the eventuality makes him feel a lot more in control. If the persistent activity of the Yellowstone caldera fills him with a sort of nihilistic despair about having wasted his life, the existence of multidrug therapy makes him feel almost hopeful.

In fact, once he identifies the sensation he’s feeling as hope, he gets up in the night and makes himself a hot chocolate. He moves quietly through the halls. He can hear Richie snoring through the door—not deafeningly, but it makes him wonder how much louder it would be if he were in the room with him, and is that something that he would have to get used to? Buoyed by the success of tricking his brain into feeling optimism, he probes gently at the edges of his feelings about eventually sharing a bed with Richie.

It’s going to happen, he knows. But probably not until his body’s healed up again, so that’s not something he has to worry about now. Instead he can enjoy the idea and its shivering uncertainties as he sips hot chocolate at Ben’s island counter. Richie there, in the dark. Richie sleeping naked. Richie, maybe making sounds of a different nature, while Eddie is there to listen.

He is extremely weird to Richie in the morning when Richie’s drinking his coffee at the counter, his voice coming out tense and high-pitched as he throws himself out to walk at a punishing pace around Ben’s house, but it’s fine. He doesn’t stumble across Richie half-naked that day, accidentally or otherwise.

It’s not that he feels he’s conquered his fear of leprosy, it’s that the awareness that it wasn’t actually leprosy he was afraid of all this time is slowly growing larger in the back of his mind, until it’s getting difficult to ignore. So the next night he’s lying awake and he can’t sleep, he bites the bullet.

It turns out that he knows far less about HIV and AIDS than he thought he did.

He doesn’t know why that surprises him either. He understood, to a point, that the things his mother told him were bullshit (subway pole his ass), but he really thought that as an adult he understood how transmission worked and how dangerous it was. He’s a risk analyst. But he sees on the page the phrase _HIV exceptionalism_ and when he has to follow the link to that, he understands how his mental calculations have been skewed.

It’s just an illness. A fatal illness, sure, but with treatment, a near-normal life expectancy. There are plenty of more fatal illnesses on the planet, now that treatment is more readily available than it was when Eddie was a child. But Eddie’s mistake has been in thinking of it as anything more than an illness. It’s an illness. The way that it spreads can be quantified and measured. There’s even a method of assessing the likelihood of its happening built into treatment—he reads about viral loads, which he doesn’t actually think he’s heard of before. The effectiveness of treatment can be quantified. Eddie finds this comforting.

And transmission isn’t as easy as he thought it was. It can’t be transmitted through use of a public toilet (though Eddie’s issues with public bathrooms, he suspects, will be a long time in unpacking). It can’t be transmitted through sharing a drinking glass. If an HIV person prepares food, it’s not like typhus, it can’t be transmitted that way. He is mortified by looking at the CDC webpage and seeing the phrases “receptive anal sex (bottoming)” and “insertive anal sex (topping),” but that doesn’t really tell him any new information, except that the CDC is apparently up to date on their slang. HIV is not spread through saliva. There are apparently documented cases of a person with HIV biting someone and transmitting it that way, but there’s no risk of transmission without broken skin.

Why did Eddie think it could be passed through saliva?

He remembers, to his horror, a waving prehensile tongue.

That night he gets up and turns the lights on in Ben’s living room and slowly rolls down all the blinds on the windows. It’s not that he wants to see night outside; it’s that he doesn’t want to feel like there are walls around him. He doesn’t want to be reminded, even in the slightest, of that condemned basement and its dramatic sheet and then turning and finding the danger was beside him all along. He sleeps on the couch. He doesn’t dream. He wakes up to find Richie tapping at his shoulder gingerly from all the way down his long arm, as though afraid that Eddie would lash out in his sleep if disturbed.

The list of vectors and activities that don’t transmit HIV is far longer than those that do. There are all manner of social activities Eddie could undertake with a person with HIV that would be completely safe—and more to the point, maybe he has. It’s not like his workplace is a paragon of employee safety and equality, and he understands workplace discrimination against people with HIV is still alive and well. But—Eddie shakes hands at work. If someone with HIV works in his circles, he has shaken their hand. And he’s fine. And—more to the point—while Eddie is the type of man who keeps hand sanitizer on his desk and in his car and in his work bag, and while he has another dispenser pointed outward for people who happen to drop by to speak to him to use—he doesn’t want to be the kind of person who refuses to shake another person’s hand for fear of them _contaminating_ him.

He knows that there are germaphobes who do. But Eddie is damn good at his job, and he’s not likeable and that’s never bothered him before, but he’s never refused to shake someone’s hand before. He knows the statistics about men washing their hands after they use the restroom. But there are some things you do if you want to succeed in business, and Eddie has been successful despite his abrasive personality. He has never drawn back from a handshake and immediately wiped his hands as though a person were filthy. That would be… that would be…

It makes him think of the kind of person who would do that to Mike. Who felt sullied by who he is.

And if HIV is just an illness, and not a moral failing or divine punishment or—Eddie’s never chalked anything else in his life up to divine punishment, so why would he start with that?—if it’s just an illness, then he’s been… part of the problem. His fear of AIDS, like the world was ending, with the desperate fear of a child in 1989 who was convinced he was going to die but didn’t know why—he threw his fear into the pot and as a society they made stone soup of it, and then they all ate poison.

The CDC website has parentheticals after “semen” and “pre-seminal fluid” that spell “ _cum_ ” with a U, and that combined with the horror of realizing that he has been wrong makes Eddie hang up his phone for the night.

“Am I a horrible person?” he asks Richie during second breakfast the next day.

Richie insists on calling it second breakfast, because Richie’s a fucking nerd. His culinary oeuvre begins with “breakfast foods” and ends with “boxes with instructions on the side” and pancakes are the perfect intersection of that. He spins his long-handled spatula in his hand like a baton, hypnotically, while he talks about bubbles and fluffiness in pancakes, and Eddie, hypnotized by the twirling motion, blurts out the awkward question.

Richie stands there staring straight down into the frying pan for a few seconds more, and then he slowly turns his head toward Eddie in notches, like the question is so weird he has to fight the urge to do double-takes the whole way. His brows make an almost straight line across his forehead.

“What?”

“Like, I’m,” Eddie says, and then shrugs. It pulls at his chest and back. He should know by now not to do that, especially when he’s in pain to begin with. He swallows and puts his elbows on the counters, dropping his head between his hands as he thinks of how best to phrase it.

He doesn’t want to confess to late-night Googling and Wikipedia spirals. He doesn’t want to admit to the number of tabs open on his phone. And there are fears that are harder to admit to Richie than transgressions.

“Because you don’t know how to make _pancakes_?” Richie asks, apparently completely lost.

“No,” Eddie says, though he doesn’t. He has tried maybe once in his adult life—he tried to make Myra breakfast in bed once, for a birthday or an anniversary, and his pancakes came out thin as crepes, and Myra was very suspicious of his scrambled eggs. He just doesn’t have the patience for cooking, and now he has the excuse not to stand for extended periods of time, he can make Richie do it for him. Is that more evidence that he is secretly a terrible person?

“Because, like, it takes some getting used to,” Richie says, more generously than the topic allows. “I mean, pancakes are like kids—the first one’s always a throwaway, and I say that with full knowledge of Went and Maggie—”

“We’re both only children and I’ve heard that joke on at least eight sitcoms,” Eddie says, more tersely than he might if his chest weren’t hurting and his legs weren’t aching.

Richie points the spatula at him. “Uh-uh-uh, you’ve heard that kids are like pancakes and the first one’s a throwaway. I’m not trivializing childrearing for humor, I’m making pancakes extremely serious and also being self-deprecating in one fell swoop.”

“And insulting me.”

“That’s a bonus. I’m secretly very good at my job.”

Eddie opens his mouth a little in disbelief and then asks, “Why’d you say the thing about the pills?”

Richie is quiet for a moment. Eddie knows him, knows how tangentially he can follow the threads of a conversation, knows how sometimes he pauses and stares at the wall with his face scrunched up, trying to work out how they ended up on this topic. He knows that Richie’s not trying to keep up with him, it’s something else.

“What thing about the pills?” Richie asks.

Eddie looks up at him sharply. “Bullshit,” he says. “You know exactly what thing about the pills.” He doesn’t even add a _fuck you_ because it would soften it. Staring at Richie accusingly, however, actually gets the result he wants.

Richie’s shoulders shift like he’s squirming in place. “Fine, fine. I’m sorry about that.”

“That’s not why I asked,” Eddie says. “I asked you once why you said it and you said you didn’t know.”

Richie drops the spatula down on the stove and tilts his head all the way back, pushing his thumbs under his glasses to rest on his closed eyelids. For a moment Eddie is truly horrified at the idea that he might have made Richie cry, just like that, easy as punching Bill, but then Richie’s mouth opens and he just sighs.

“Because I thought you were about to fucking skewer me for my gay little crush on you, and I wanted to get you first,” he says. “Best defense is a good offense, blah blah blah.”

Eddie takes a deep breath and then sighs it through his nose. He really didn’t anticipate the depth to which Richie nursed and protected this secret, and it feels like every time Richie says something about it, he uncovers new depths for Eddie to be worried about.

“How’d you know that would get to me?” he asks.

How did Richie, who saw him conscious and self-medicating for maybe sixty hours, tops, before Eddie was hospitalized and given morphine, know that was where to aim, if he was trying to protect the thing he was most ashamed of? Because a man who took those things for his health wouldn’t have been ashamed of it. Probably also wouldn’t have had a stash of Quaaludes (for emergencies!) either.

Richie sucks his teeth and shifts his weight, bounces one knee while standing. “Because you always used to roll your eyes when your little alarm went off, when you were a kid,” he says, his voice low. “And then one day, you didn’t. You looked around like you were scared.”

Despite the low-grade pain emanating from his torso, Eddie feels his whole face go numb. “What.”

“I don’t think I consciously—I was trying not to believe in the clown then,” Richie says. “I didn’t know for sure that it was It, back then. I just knew it was something you didn’t like but you did anyway, and then _something_ changed and I didn’t know how you felt about it, and then you showed back up in Derry and you were—I packed your bags out of the Townhouse. I had to go to the hotel desk and show them proof you were hospitalized, and then they didn’t believe me because Bev was next of kin and because I kept yelling at them, but I packed your bags. I saw all the stuff that you had in there. And then Bill showed up and dumped everything and told me you told him to do it, but…” He swallows. A big gulp. Like choking down a pill.

Eddie’s breathing is coming shallower and he focuses on that, staring down at the grain in the stone countertop.

“I’m sorry,” Richie says. “I didn’t mean it. I just—it was just a stupid thing. I.”

But he said it. He got scared and looked for something that would hurt and he threw It at him, despite not knowing all the details.

“Come here,” Eddie says.

Richie, with the look of a man going to his execution, picks up the spatula again and slides a well-done pancake onto the stack on the plate. Then he takes the two steps back toward the island, grimaces, and kneels so that Eddie can look straight across the island into his penitent face.

“So what happened was, I was out by Neibolt house,” Eddie says. “And my alarm goes off. So I go to get my sugar pills out of my fanny pack, and I drop them. Like, the whole damn pharmacy. So I’m scrabbling around trying to pick them up off the ground—I was going to eat them off the road, believe it or not—and a hand holds one out to me. And It’s this—thing. Person-shaped, but.” He closes his eyes. “Disfigured. Nose rotted off, and eyes—” He gestures with both thumbs on his own face, indicating the lopsided stare. “—and pus, and drool, and It holds the pill out to me, and It says, _take your medicine, Eddie._ ”

Richie says nothing.

Eddie keeps his eyes shut. “And I’m thirteen, and this… _man_ has, like, bandages coming off him, he’s all dressed up in bandages, but I’m not Ben, I don’t think _that’s a mummy_ , I think _oh god, this tramp has leprosy_. But I don’t know why I thought of leprosy, because that wasn’t what I was really afraid of, what I was afraid of was AIDS. Just—scared shitless of AIDS. I don’t know why. It’s not like I knew I was gay, it’s not like anyone had ever touched me or anything, I was just convinced I was going to get this disease, and then It says, _Hey, Eddie, I’ll blow you for a quarter_.”

He doesn’t do a voice or anything for it. That’s Richie’s territory, and he thinks that the both of them are afraid to speak It into existence here in Ben’s kitchen, with the frying pan still hot and waiting on the range.

“So I run away, and it keeps screaming after me, _I’ll blow you for a dime. I’ll blow you for a nickel. I’ll do it for free._ I was—” He brings his hands up and touches his fingertips to his face, just gently. He can feel the brush of his stubble at his jaw, the faint roughness of the new scar on his cheek, how soft and yielding the skin under his eyes is. “—you remember how I was when I was thirteen, I didn’t want to talk about girls, I wasn’t even thinking about boys, I didn’t think I’d ever have sex at all, so it wasn’t like it was something I wanted, I just. That’s what it said to me.”

When he opens his eyes, Richie is not looking at him. He’s staring slightly down at the countertop, his gaze unfocused. If the island weren’t in the way, Eddie realizes, he’d be staring at Eddie’s chest wound.

“So that’s what happened,” he finishes lamely. “That scared me to death, about my timer, I guess. That was what I was remembering.”

Richie’s shoulders shift as he draws his arms in tight against his body. “We’re not talking about you being a horrible person anymore, are we?”

Eddie shakes his head. He almost knows what he wanted to say to Richie about that, but he’s not going to say it now.

Richie says, “It was you. For me.”

Eddie blinks. “What?”

“Not—I mean, there was this whole thing where Paul Bunyan had a mouth like a pencil sharpener fucked a chainsaw and It asked me for a kiss, but like—in Neibolt. The first time. When we got separated. Before the werewolf.” He’s still not looking at him, and the frames of his glasses block part of his brows and his upper lashes so Eddie can’t read his face as completely as he wants to. “But It wanted to lure me deeper into the house, away from Bill, so It pretended to be you. Just you walking around. And then—you puked all this acid, dude. Like, black stuff, all over the floor, it ate away the floor, Bill and I were like in a Super Mario game trying to get away—that’s where the doors were from, the _Scary, Very Scary,_ joke recycling bitch.”

Oh. Then the closets were for Richie. The closets and the Pomeranian because of his puppy joke outside, and Eddie just followed along kind of hanging off Richie’s arm.

“And then this last time,” Richie says, “I come out of the deadlights, and you’re on top of me just like—” He smiles suddenly, doing a perfect face quote of Eddie in utter life-affirming joy. “And I’m so fucking confused, dude, like, did you kiss me to get me out of the deadlights?”

“No,” Eddie says. He swallows. “Sorry. I don’t think I would have been brave enough.”

Richie scrunches up his nose and mouth and waves a hand, like it’s no big deal. “No, no, you just threw a fucking javelin through a demon’s head, way easier than planting one on this mug.” Before Eddie can say anything Richie’s face goes blank again and he says, “And I’m like _do I kiss him back?_ and before I can make up my mind, you just—”

He gives a hard jerk with his whole body, his hand flaring open, and Eddie realizes that is Richie miming his impalement. That’s what Richie saw.

Then he brings both hands to his mouth and mimes an explosion pulling away. “Blood,” he says. Then he grimaces and tilts back, sinking below the level of the counter entirely, and Eddie realizes he’s given up and is sitting down on the kitchen floor.

“Oh,” Eddie says.

Richie is quiet for a moment, and then he says, “That wasn’t me trying to one-up you or anything, I just—I’ll show you mine if you show me yours?”

Eddie swallows, trying not to think about his blood. Instead, he thinks about the Paul Bunyan statue. “Did you know back then?” he asks. “That you were—I mean—?”

“Oh yeah,” Richie says, his voice suddenly broad and sardonic. “Yeah, me, myself, and the alien clown were all in on what a little—” The word _fuck_ doesn’t make Eddie’s ears sting anymore, but the word Richie uses then, in the mocking tone he uses, absolutely does. “—I was,” Richie finishes easily.

“That’s not what I meant,” Eddie says in the ringing silence, his voice soft.

“Oh,” Richie says. His elbow appears over the edge of the counter and Eddie hears him scratching at his hair. “Well, what did you mean?” he asks, refusing to apologize for what he just said.

“I—” It feels stupid to ask now. Stupid and vain in the wake of Richie’s vitriol. “Nothing,” Eddie says.

“No,” Richie says, voice suddenly terse. He straightens up enough that he can peer over the counter at Eddie. “No, you wanted to do this, let’s do it, all right?”

Eddie stares at him, baffled. “What do you think I wanted to do?”

He huffs a little through his nose and his black eyes flick away. “I don’t know,” he says, his eyes closing, his voice softening in something like exhaustion. “I mean, I already did the whole _making an ass out of you and umptions_ thing, I thought…”

But Eddie thinks he understands. Their dynamic is so much about blows and parrying blows, that when Richie finally lands one that cuts Eddie deep, his first instinct is to vivisect himself.

“I love you,” Eddie says, so softly and sincerely that when Richie screws up his eyes and bows his head, he doesn’t dare lean over the counter to see what his face is doing.

“Oh, god, maybe I’m not the one to talk to about horrible people,” Richie says. Eddie hears the shift of his body, hears the rivets on his jeans click against the floor as he lies down, as though the weight of the conversation is too much for him. “And I’m a little biased in your favor, anyway.”

“You think I’m fucking insane,” Eddie reminds him.

Richie laughs. “Yeah, but not really. Or if you are, right now it’s to my benefit, so.” There’s a pause. “Actually I just remembered that javelin thing, you are fucking insane.”

“It was a high point of that day,” Eddie admits. “Are you done cooking? Are you gonna turn off that stove?”

* * *

He feels a little bit like he’s returned to a familiar place: both sure of and not sure of Richie.

Sometimes the medication makes him nauseous even when he takes it with food. He doesn’t want to be touched then, so he curls up on the couch with the huge blanket cocooned around him and sulks. Richie gives him his space and takes a chair instead of jockeying for position with him on the couch, and Eddie watches him: the way he hooks his knees over the arm of the chair, his bare toes. He tries to divine what Richie is up to on his phone just from the movements of his eyes, the flicks of his thumbs, the way he adjusts the position of his arm balanced on his leg. He thinks it’s probably texting and maybe the Solitaire game he’s always playing.

Richie looks at him a couple of times too, glancing from phone to TV to his face. The first time he catches Eddie already staring he waggles his eyebrows and then pulls a face to make Eddie huff a queasy laugh. The second time he asks, “What?”

Eddie is aware he’s stoned but he also feels a curious disinclination to move. Lying still feels very easy and well within his capabilities. Articulating to Richie exactly what’s going on in his head feels out of his depth. He just blinks at him.

Richie gives a little half-laugh. “Okay, bright eyes,” he says, and returns to what he’s doing with a small smile.

Here are the things Eddie has observed: that Richie thinks it’s funny when Eddie’s high. He doesn’t kiss him then—not unless Eddie demands it—but he lets his guard down a little, smiles softer, looks at him more openly. If Eddie drags him onto the couch with them he’s still careful about where his hands go and what touches Eddie’s back or chest, but he also rubs his face against the top of Eddie’s head saying, _Are you always this fluffy or do you just need a haircut?_ (He’s always that fluffy.)

Eddie doesn’t quite know how he feels about that. He’s not used to a lot of physical affection—not used to having someone hold him and rub up against him like a cat—so it’s a little bit like Richie’s breaking new ground there. Much as his mother wanted him to stay her baby, she was always more likely to smother him in quilts than in her arms; and Eddie remains vigilant, as ever, for hints of pity, for gleams of satisfaction that Eddie is vulnerable and needs care.

Richie doesn’t have it. He adapts to Eddie’s routine because Eddie insists on getting up at dawn and driving himself into the ground and then keeling over onto the couch. He gets up to make coffee so frequently during the day that Eddie gets incredibly anxious about Richie’s teeth, and only when he’s already up does he ask if Eddie wants hot chocolate or water or something. He pours real maple syrup onto Eddie’s two precisely-placed pancakes, and then eats five plain with his bare hands, bypassing a plate entirely.

Eventually he asks, “Hey, if you were starving to death, you would tell me, right? You’re not about to become a suffer-in-silence kind of dude?”

Eddie blinks at him. He is enjoying how much real maple syrup just tastes like straight-up sugar. Richie asking him to be forthcoming about his nutrition—isn’t unreasonable, but it definitely distracts him from the experience.

“What?”

“I eat _so_ much takeout, man,” Richie says. “I am not the domestic goddess I have claimed to be.”

Eddie giggles a little.

“So like, if you get tired of living in Richie Tozier’s twenty-four-hour diner, you can tell me before you have to beat me to death with a skillet,” Richie says. “Like, I will understand.”

The idea of people cooking for him unnerves him. Granted, eating a lot of breakfast food at all hours of the day aligns pretty nicely with his discharge instructions to eat protein and calories. Also Eddie’s been instructed to eat six times a day and not wait until he gets hungry, so a certain level of disinterest and nausea goes with that, but when he smells Richie frying bacon his stomach gets its priorities in line pretty fast.

Eddie says, “I don’t want to ask you to, like… cook specific things for me.” The idea fills him with the same discomfort as Richie’s parents making him breakfast. He’s been telling himself that it’s different as long as Richie is cooking for both of them, and Richie certainly seems happy to also eat six times a day, but Eddie can’t be like _what’s for dinner?_ with him.

“Not that I wouldn’t make an amazing 1950s housewife,” Richie says, stubble too long today, pancake batter smeared across his too-tight t-shirt, having hissed twice in the process as he burned himself. “But we’re scraping the end of my repertoire and if I don’t get some Thai food in me soon I’m gonna cry. I mean, I’m gonna cry anyway, because I’m a white boy and red pepper flakes are too spicy for me, but like, that’ll be happy tears.”

Eddie says, “I’ve never had Thai food.”

Richie’s face lights up. “Oh,” he says, his voice very low and full of promise. “Oh, Eddie.”

Instead of Googling _Thai food near me_ like a normal person, Richie calls Ben. Eddie is right there in his post-meal digestive slump on the couch, feeling heavy but oddly content in a way he usually isn’t after meals, so he gets to eavesdrop on Richie flouting social conventions.

“Hey, Haystack,” Richie says. “You’ve got this whole _I studied abroad in Asia_ thing going on—where can I take Eddie to introduce him to the wonderful world of Thai food?”

There’s a pause.

Richie laughs softly through his nose. “Hi, Ben. I love you too, Ben. How is your totally-not-a-honeymoon vacation going?” Another pause and then, “Yeah, tell her I heard that and the answer is _no. No. None of your business. No._ ” Pause. “Really? Like, with real worms?”

Eddie has to pipe up. “Please don’t feed me worms.” He doesn’t know what’s in Thai food, but he has a vague idea about authentic tequila from Mexico and the legend of the worm in the bottle, so it doesn’t seem out of the realm of possibility. He hopes this ignorance isn’t just blindingly racist.

“Not you, bub,” Richie says easily, before his focus flicks back to the middle distance as he listens to Ben. His brow furrows and he gives an incredulous frown. “Seriously? I was kidding!” He adjusts his phone so that he can say, as an aside to Eddie, “Ben’s lived in Thailand.”

“Of course he has,” Eddie says.

From the way his shoulders hitch up and he hunches forward, grinning, Richie seems to find this incredibly funny. “Did you hear that?” he asks into the mic again, and whatever Ben says twists him up harder trying to keep his laughter in. “No. No, we’re good, we’ve just been surviving on my cooking and like, sometimes you just want to eat something that actually tastes good.”

“Your food tastes good,” Eddie says. Real maple syrup. Bacon cooked so crispy it cracks apart in his teeth. Butter.

Richie’s eyes flick toward him again and some of the hilarity fades out of his stance, but Eddie can’t read what he’s thinking on his face. Still looking at Eddie, he says to Ben, “You realize that narrows down _where in the world is Benjamin Sandiego_ like, a lot, right?” Whatever Ben says in response makes his eyes and mouth pop open. “Haystack! Even I couldn’t say that onstage! Fuck!”

Eddie is slowly discovering that he dislikes only being able to hear half of the conversation. He picks up his blanket and wraps it around himself, feeling like a bat, forbidding.

When Richie hangs up he turns to Eddie and says, “Okay, so Ben didn’t actually say where they are, but he did make a joke about Bev’s husband, and I quote, ‘falling through the ice and dying.’”

Eddie feels his eyebrows lift in surprise. “That doesn’t sound like Ben.”

“I know. I expect that kind of shit from Bev, but like.” He whistles a little. “Anyway, Ben apparently sometimes gets homesick for his days in Thailand—” He widens his eyes at Eddie to show the deep skepticism he feels about this. “—and goes to buy soup from a place like three towns over.”

Eddie stares at him, trying to imagine wanting _soup_ badly enough to go to that effort. “How far away is three towns over?”

“Like two hours, seriously, what the fuck, Ben?” Richie asks. He tosses his phone down carelessly on the coffee table and then drops down onto the couch so abruptly that he bounces Eddie in the process. Eddie grimaces and hangs onto the ends of his blanket to ride out the lurching pain that comes from being jostled. “Oh, shit, sorry.”

When Eddie opens his eyes, Richie’s are very wide. Instead of actually reassuring him, Eddie just tips over sideways into him, still bundled up in his blanket and landing with his arm up against Richie’s chest to break the fall. “So is Thai food, like, two-hours-away good?”

“I have done more for less,” Richie says, his voice suddenly very throaty. Eddie doesn’t know what that means, but then Richie swallows and says in his normal voice, “Anyway, up to you.”

He never grabs Eddie by the torso, instead maneuvering him around using his shoulders and legs. Now he turns Eddie slightly, slowly, so that Eddie can flinch away if he wants, putting his back to Richie’s chest. The blanket is thick enough that Eddie can’t feel his body heat, but it does provide some cushioning for the wound in his back. Richie reaches down and wraps hands around his thighs and uses them to pull him up higher, and that makes Eddie go so tense that Richie tilts his head to look into his face and see if he’s hurt him again.

“That okay?” he asks.

If Eddie were feeling a little more alert and energetic, he thinks he’d shrug out of the circle of Richie’s arms, toss the blanket, and turn around to climb on his lap. They’ve done that a couple of times, Richie’s hands either on Eddie’s hips or hooked behind his knees, Eddie pushing Richie back into the couch as they kiss. But the depth with which he wants it, in that moment, frightens him.

Instead he leans back all the way across Richie, until his head rests on the arm of the couch and he’s stretched across Richie’s lap, able to look up into his face. “What do you mean, _up to me_?” he asks.

Richie shrugs a little, hand creeping toward Eddie’s hair as though it’s irresistible. “You feel like four hours in a car through scenic upstate New York, I’m cool to drive. We can stop somewhere and get you shirts that actually fit on the way.”

Eddie scrunches down a little further in the blanket. “I like your shirts,” he says.

Richie grins. “Yeah, but you hate them too, don’t lie.”

It’s very important that Richie understand that the shirts are just shirts, and not a metaphor for how Eddie feels about Richie. Eddie tips his head back even further and sighs, “You are forty years old and you have a button-down covered in little skulls.”

Richie snickers. “I mean, half the appeal of watching you walk around in my skull shirt is you yelling at me for owning a skull shirt.”

He swallows instead of asking Richie to say out loud what the other half is. Richie has given up wearing his button-downs entirely so that Eddie can borrow them and is just wandering around in his t-shirts, which is pretty goddamn distracting. And Eddie worries, since it’s early October, that Richie might get cold and just not say anything.

“So you don’t want your shirts back?” Eddie asks.

“No,” Richie says, so emphatically that Eddie laughs. He checks himself. “I mean, like, eventually I would like them to be my shirts again, but if they’re the only thing you can wear I’m cool with that. Nice as it would be if you were half-naked all the time.”

Eddie grimaces, thinking of his bandages and how he’s constantly either too hot or too cold. He knows Richie’s being flirty, that he’s suggesting an idea that probably has more to do with the concept of nakedness being sexy instead of the reality of Eddie’s torso. He’s still spattered black and green with bruising, sewn together, whited out with big waterproof gauze rectangles. When he thinks about how anxious it made him to have Myra walk in on him naked, it’s the difference between being an object of hilarity and between being an object of pity.

But Richie likes him in his shirts. Richie likes that. His oversized kind of ugly shirts hanging too long, too wide on Eddie.

He considers admitting to Richie that they’ve lost some of their appeal because Richie’s no longer wearing them, that they don’t smell like him when Eddie puts them on. He doesn’t know how long it’ll be before he’s descending the stairs to the laundry room while Richie’s sleeping and pulling Richie’s dirty t-shirts out of the basket to hold them to his nose, but he knows that Richie would _definitely_ make a crack about that.

Whatever. It’s not Eddie’s fault. Richie smells good. Coffee and leather and body smells, whole biomes of sweat and mold and viruses that live on Richie’s body, that get to live on Richie’s body. Richie’s bacteria colonies are superior to other bacteria colonies.

Eddie’s got it bad.

“I can buy shirts,” Eddie says loudly, trying to interrupt his own thoughts about shoving his face into Richie’s armpit.

He hasn’t gotten out of Ben’s house since they arrived. He just sleeps a lot and sends Richie on errands. But if he got tired while he was running errands with Richie—a two-hour drive is plenty of time to fall asleep in the car and wake up to Richie singing to himself. He doesn’t even think that Richie would mind. He certainly hasn’t _showed_ that he minds that all Eddie does is eat and sleep and leach his body heat and talk. And if he’s bored—he _knows_ Richie is bored. They should go outside. Have a goal to accomplish and do it. Eat something new.

Go on a date.

“Wait a fucking minute,” Eddie says, sitting up a little. Richie leans back slightly to make room so that if Eddie bolts upright they won’t clonk heads. But Eddie just looks at him, watching Richie’s face for hints. Richie looks wary. Eddie lets himself smile a little to put him at ease. “You wanna, like, _take me to dinner_ , take me to dinner.”

Richie blinks once and then grins, eyes scrunching shut. “I mean, yeah, dude, what were you asking for when you said we should be a _package deal_?” He pulls on the last words in a way that’s half-teasing, half implicit innuendo.

“Well if you’re gonna ask me out, just fucking ask me out,” Eddie says. “Don’t like couch it in terms of _if you feel up for it_ , just—” He doesn’t want to have to work around his recovery. He wants to pretend like it doesn’t matter.

“ _Oh—my god,”_ Richie drawls out, exasperated and suddenly very San Fernando Valley in intonation. “Fuck me for trying to be _fucking considerate_.”

His hand pushes through the hair at the nape of Eddie’s neck and he shifts slightly, tilting him at an angle so that his throat is exposed. Eddie’s internal thermostat switches over from _too cold_ to _too hot_ immediately. He takes a breath and has to remind himself not to hold it.

Richie leans down and speaks directly into Eddie’s ear. “Eddie.” His voice is low and coaxing. “Let me take you to dinner.”

His lips are so close to his neck. All of Eddie’s skin seems alive for it, waiting for _touch_.

And Eddie—his brain always categorizing symptoms and trying to measure signs—is recognizing a pattern. Richie feels vulnerable and he pushes back. First he lashed out because he was afraid that Eddie was going to hurt him, and now he feels vulnerable and tries to distract, tending sexy, shoving Eddie up against a bathroom counter and kissing him, sweet-talking him on a couch. It’s possible, Eddie allows, that he’s trying to make sure those moments where he gives something of himself haven’t put Eddie off him entirely, but.

Eddie can’t help thinking. Richie said he loves him, but Richie’s still trying to hide something from him, to protect something.

So what does Eddie do with that?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Kate Marsden](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kate_Marsden).
> 
> Fanart I need to add to the correct chapters but are here for now!
> 
> [@jacquelying on Twitter, Richie & Eddie in the mirror](https://twitter.com/jacquelying/status/1274757501398011904)
> 
> [@trashcanprince on Twitter, Richie & Eddie kissing over the countertop](https://twitter.com/trashcanprince/status/1277451020822409216)
> 
> (Both of these have wonderful shirts in them I'm going to have to work into the shopping montage next chapter.)
> 
> AND [@sberryslothcake on Twitter, Richie being Big (TM) and Eddie wiping out on Silver](https://twitter.com/Sberryslothcake/status/1264078006571556865).
> 
> I THINK that's everything since my hiatus, I'll go back and organize later. Thank you so much! You can find me @IfItHollers on Twitter or @tthael on tumblr.


	18. Say Your Lines

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Theoretical and field research in love, sex, and loneliness.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Remember how last chapter I set up great opportunity for fluff and Eddie and Richie's first date? This is not that. It's pretty angsty. Sorry, the cute date will happen next chapter.
> 
> Content warnings for this chapter: Eddie meditates on his experiences with and perceptions of sex and it is... not good, guys. If you're triggered by non-graphic discussions of sex where one party doesn't feel physical desire to have sex but goes through with it anyway, you might want to give the whole first part a miss. I'll give you the vital bits in the end notes, but you can go ahead and skip to "On the morning of the date" after the break. (For context, Eddie's ideas about sex are tangled up in ideas of toxic masculinity, weird emphasis on virginity, and pressure to have and enjoy sex that have aphobic implications.)
> 
> Also: Eddie was a late bloomer, Eddie's canonical relationship with pills and doctors, body horror and blood, canonical violence (Bowers stabbing Eddie, Eddie's death scene), weird self esteem metaphors, nonexplicit reference to Richie using a homophobic slur about himself from last chapter, Eddie has a post-traumatic fit, EMETOPHOBIA: (Richie leaves the room to stress-vomit offscreen), Richie makes another fat joke and Eddie doesn't call him out for it (I'm sorry).

Diseases aren’t the only thing Eddie researches.

If asked, Eddie would say that he’s had a medium amount of sex. Not a lot, but what he considers to be a substantial amount, and he chalks that up to his marriage. He’s almost forty-one and he’s been sexually active for about eight and a half years—consistently and almost like clockwork for about four years, and then less frequent over about a year, and then not at all in the last three years, where he stayed up with the crickets in the building at night while Myra slept.

He can’t really say he missed it. Over time, sex became less of the intriguing mystery it was before he married, to a rite of passage that was going to happen in the same way that they were going to go on a honeymoon. He may have been relieved by that at the time, because it meant he didn’t have to think about or worry about virginity ever again. He could take comfort that, when he finally became sexually active, he did so in a very structured way unassailable by the moral majority. Up until then he thought of his virginity very rarely, but with a sort of grievance, like a splinter working its way out of his finger. He supposed it was the cultural expectation around men and sex that bothered him, though no one ever asked him about it—except his mother, who sometimes asked him if he’d met any _dirty women_ and straightened his collar, proprietary.

Honestly, now that Eddie looks back over his timeline for the year 2008—his mother’s sudden decline, her going on oxygen, her pneumonia, her hospitalization, her coma, her death; followed _almost immediately_ by his engagement and marriage to Myra—he understands a little bit why his coworkers kept coming up to him and asking him if he was okay. At the time it drove him insane, but now he imagines explaining how that year went to Richie—or even to Stan or Bev—and he wants to put his head in his hands.

Sonia and Myra’s few interactions—including one incredibly awkward dinner in his mother’s house, where they argued about rinsing grit out of lettuce and whether or not Eddie actually liked the meal Myra had brought over while Sonia was “indisposed” (dying)—were so contentious and full of ice-cold jabs that Eddie suddenly found himself comfortable in the middle of the battleground that was the dining room. Now when he looks back on it—he can’t decide if he thought that Myra would be someone who could stand up to Sonia the way that he wanted, or if their sniping at each other just… made him miss bickering.

Yeah, he can absolutely never tell Richie about that. Ever.

He can’t say that he had very high expectations for sexual frequency within the marriage. They scheduled it, having a vague idea that both of them were very busy—Myra was still working food service at the time, though Eddie promised her that with his next raise she would be able to quit—and that marriage was all work and choice, that if they let their relationship coast on love and love alone it would founder. So they had sex once a week (Eddie consulted surveys about sexual frequency for newlyweds of their age), and both admitted to feeling proud about this workmanlike approach to marriage—the _choice_ of it, the work put into choosing to stay together. (Later, marriage counselors would advise such things to them, and they would smugly report that they already practiced such things.)

Eddie doesn’t know when he started to get headaches the day of, or a persistent feeling that he’d woken up on the wrong side of the bed. Eventually on something like an impulse he asked Myra about the timing on Saturday and whether perhaps they could try sex during lazy mornings in bed. First thing.

When he suggested this, Myra looked at him with something like surprise but also a secret little smile at the corners of her mouth. After that first inaugural Saturday morning, she giggled into her pillow, and Eddie felt more accomplished than he ever had in bed with his wife. “It’s awfully romantic of you,” she admitted, looking pleased.

And Eddie didn’t have the heart to tell her that his brilliant romantic idea was spurred not by the desire to be self-indulgent, or the need to have her immediately, but that he sometimes awoke erect just from the pressure of his bladder on his prostate while he slept. There is very little romantic about the mechanics of the body.

And then even that stopped happening. First Eddie explained that he just wasn’t sleeping well, and Myra became concerned about his health and brought him tea in the evenings to help him get to sleep (Eddie hates tea), and suggested melatonin supplements, and Eddie talked to his doctor about sleeping pills. Eventually he came to believe that it truly was a problem with his sleep, because he struggled to drift off on Friday nights and then he didn’t want to wake up in a timely manner on Saturdays. He slept until noon and still woke feeling… exhausted. Maybe on more of a physical level. So there were no more romantic mornings for Mr. and Mrs. Edward Kaspbrak.

He is aware—even before he saw Richie Tozier’s most recent stand-up comedy routine, streaming on his phone over airport wi-fi while waiting for his flight to Bangor—that this is not how most men claim to feel about sex. Nobody else seems to have dread surrounding it, or report reluctance to go to sleep because they’ll have to wake and worship their wife with their bodies, as they promised in their marriage vows in front of God and everybody. There’s a large portion of the population that is eager for sex, that will—if you believe Richie’s routine—do all manner of repugnant things in order to have it, that isn’t satisfied even when they seem to have a reliable source in their relationships, that do things like jerk off to other people’s Facebook pages.

(Part of his relief, when Richie dead-eyed admitted that he does not write his own material back at the restaurant in Derry, was that of course no one actually feels that way in real life. It’s all caricature, all exaggeration, all hyperbole for comedic effect.)

He remembers feeling odd after his wedding night—the morning after, when he felt too anxious (at the time, he assumed it was about his upcoming flight) to lie in his marriage bed for even a moment longer and he had to go running, despite not having packed any exercise clothes. At the time he chalked it up to being old, for a virgin, and thought that maybe if he’d done some sneaking around in high school and gotten it over with—the way boys were _supposed_ to do—when everybody else was, maybe by the time he was thirty-two his feelings about sex would have untangled themselves. Maybe he wouldn’t have failed in leading his bride—who smiled sweetly at him and told him how relieved she was that they’d both waited, that they’d get to explore this together—through what felt like an ankle-high obstacle course he utterly wiped out on.

But of course, Eddie couldn’t remember high school and being a teenager and sneaking around with anyone. And now that he has those memories back— _thanks_ , evil clown or turtle or whoever the fuck just decided to steal a chunk of Eddie’s life—he can’t remember much sexual desire either. He remembers physical arousal, certainly—remembers how from the age of fourteen to maybe high school graduation his erections were unpredictable and utterly horrific and he could take care of them through masturbation, but that was something to be hidden and to be performed only while watching the door, ready to yank his hand away under the covers if the bedroom door opened or if his mother rattled the knob and asked why he was taking so long in the bathroom.

Richie made a lot of cracks about dicks and masturbation and sex in general when they were far too young to be anything more than greasy little goblins, but Eddie can’t really remember being young and just whiting out with need. Nothing happened like the tunnel vision in the Starbucks. Eddie has vague memories of puppy love for Bill Denbrough that he completely mistook for just hero worship—and there were elements of that, yeah. He thinks that sometimes, when his friends asked him what girl he had a crush on, he ran through a mental Rolodex of his classmates and just chose the prettiest one—and he might have gotten out of some of the pressure once or twice by claiming he had a crush on Bev, which all the other guys just shook their heads about, because everyone knew that compared to Bill Denbrough Eddie Kaspbrak didn’t have a chance, so there was no reason for him to bother.

But.

There was one fall afternoon. He remembers lying on his bed, remembers his red sweater because it was brighter than almost anything else in the room, remembers the sun streaming in through the window and making him feel like he was made of glass too, but in a nice way. Not in a fragile way— _a boy made of glass! So delicate! So breakable!_ —but in the way that he felt like the sun could pour through him too and warm him, make him nothing but light and warmth.

And he remembers how he curled up around those warm thoughts, as though he had to put his body between them and the door to protect them—and he ran his fingertips and then his knuckles over his lips. And he wondered about kissing—the horror stories everyone heard about two people who had braces getting locked together—and whether there was an equivalent like that for glasses. Not that he was worried about it—he didn’t have glasses, and there was no one with glasses he wanted to kiss. But he just idly touched his mouth, feeling where his lower lip was starting to chap, and he thought about it.

(At dinner that evening his mother asked him if he was getting a cold sore and made him put Carmex on his lips. He remembers the red sweater and the chemical stink of the petroleum jelly under his nose.)

And that was about as much _exploration_ as Eddie Kaspbrak ever got up to. Something so mild that even Sonia Kaspbrak probably wouldn’t have been concerned about if she walked in on it—though Eddie remembers how he jolted upright when she called him for dinner, like he’d been doing something wrong.

Anyway, sex education is available on the internet now. Derry High School didn’t provide comprehensive or accurate information, especially in the middle of the AIDS crisis, where the argument was that the only way to be completely sure you would never contract any kind of STD was through abstinence. He has vague memories of a married couple who came in (from… somewhere. Maybe a church?) to speak to them, who brought a giant plush model of a sperm and made one of the popular girls hold it while they spoke.

Yeah. Thanks, Derry.

But there’s all kinds of stuff online now. Not just magazine websites, with their articles about _How to have your best orgasm ever!_

There are YouTube videos, which Eddie rules right out because even the security of his guest room in Ben’s house, in the dark, behind his door, while Richie is asleep in the other room, doesn’t feel safe enough to watch such things. He doesn’t have headphones to go with his new phone, and he can’t ask Richie to borrow his, because what if Richie asked him why he wanted them?

But there are also other websites. Eddie tries a few searches, spitballing for keywords trying to get information about becoming sexually active at forty, or about increased libido around the time of a midlife crisis, or about how to handle his sex life immediately after coming out. According to GQ, people as young as _twenty-two_ can be considered “older virgins,” so Eddie figures that angle is hopeless and he’s not going to find anything good there. There’s a website where two correspondents do a sort of agony aunt bit about sex questions, and they go back and forth wondering if a thirty-year-old, who wrote in asking if she should warn potential partners that she’s a virgin, might be asexual.

It makes him feel like his ribcage is collapsing in on himself. His virginity wasn’t a choice, it just happened, like sitting on a couch doing something without realizing the room is getting dark around you as the sun goes down, until suddenly you can’t see the work of your hands. Eddie never “chose to wait,” it was a completely passive action, and “choosing to wait” makes it sound like there were other opportunities for sexual activity that he consciously decided against. He thought of it very infrequently, no matter the rising panic as time went on when he did think of it. None of these are him.

Despite his attempts to treat everything else in his body as a symptom of some greater disease (which turned out to be _being Eddie Kaspbrak_ ), he left his sex life out of it. He focused on his sleep, and his general malaise, and he talked to doctors about his low mood, but he never talked about his sex life. Sometimes they asked, and Eddie explained that he and his wife had sex once a week and were perfectly happy with that, thank you, and maybe his doctors thought he was a bit of a prude because they never pressed the issue. But talking about his sex life, or night-googling _I don’t enjoy sex?_ felt like a betrayal of Myra.

Right now, Eddie thinks the issue was orientation. He thinks he’s interested in sex now—sex with men, sex with Richie in particular. He thinks he wants that. But right now he has the excuse of not being able to have sex right away. By necessity, all his thoughts are theoretical, not practical. So what if sex with a man for the first time is just like losing his virginity again—appealing in the abstract, but as soon as it becomes a reality and available it becomes a hassle?

(He wants to shove Richie down on the tufted leather couch and climb on him. Wants to see Richie’s eyes widen in surprise, wants him to lie back under him with a sort of eager watchfulness, wants to push his hands up Richie’s chest and _feel_. When he thinks of sex, he associates it with things like _pressure, physically exhausting, messy, waste of time_. When he thinks of sex with Richie—the tantalizing possibility of sex with Richie—he thinks _I want him to touch me, I want to touch him._

And—forgive him—he never thought about Myra that way. Never.)

It turns out that a lot of Google searches about _sexual readiness_ turn up scams informing him about singles in his area, all of whom happen to be scantily-clad women far too young for him. But then he finds a webpage: _10 of the Best Things You Can Do for Your Sexual Self (at Any Age)_.

Which seems promising. Eddie is attempting to locate a sexual self, in the hopes that when one is needed, he will have it available to call on.

The website is definitely directed towards teens, but most of the advice seems relevant anyway. The article calls masturbation “solo sex,” and suggests that he should consider himself as a sex partner—that sex can be something he does by himself. It stresses the importance of communication, both in being honest with a partner about his wants and needs and in talking openly about sex without shame. And it suggests the radical idea that he should enjoy himself and his sexuality—that sometimes a sexual encounter might not go to plan or might be “a bummer,” but that if he can’t feel or experience “the joy of sex”—it says that, it says _the joy of sex_ , just like the book—then it’s not worth it.

Which has been Eddie’s problem for a long time.

Honestly Eddie has some issues judging the trustworthiness of websites and their medical advice—when he’s panicky, he tends to want answers that confirm his suspicions and he doesn’t much care where they come from. He wonders a little bit if this is like that, if he likes this website because it soothes his anxieties and makes him feel supported, if he might be completely off-base and just not getting objective information because he’s not open to it, because he wants to confirm his own biases, but.

It would be so nice, not to be stressed out about sex. And Eddie doesn’t feel stressed out in the usual way, but the idea is definitely living in the back of his head and rearing up at odd moments and making him feel very out of his depth. This, at least, is reassuring.

So he clicks to the next linked article at the bottom. This just turns out to be a list of sexual or sexuality-adjacent activities that he may or may not want to participate in, with clear spaces for him to mark _yes, no, maybe, not applicable, I don’t know,_ and _fantasy_.

He’s absolutely not going to print this list out on Ben’s computer—that would be leaving a paper trail—but he reads through it, thinking, trying not to think about Richie in particular but to focus on things that he might or might not want, in the abstract. He doesn’t want to have his shirt off, for instance—he knows that as soon as he sees it on the list. Some items—such as “shaving/trimming/removing a partner’s pubic hair”—make him wrinkle his nose and hurry quickly past them. But there are also items for talking to third parties about his sex life, and “sharing sexual history with a partner,” and “experiencing or expressing unexpected or challenging emotions before, during, or after sex.”

He hasn’t really thought much about these before.

He reads through the list and all its subcategories, feeling a prickling all the way across his scalp that tells him he’s blushing. He tells himself that for the moment it’s all theoretical, and he can just read through it, it’s not like he has to report immediately to Richie about the complicated knot of emotion that crops up when he reads “wrestling or ‘play-fighting’” on the list, or the flush that comes over him when he reads “getting hickeys.” It’s fine.

There’s another article that tells him that sexual readiness is all about realities and risks, and the familiar jargon makes him feel slightly less out of his depth. He puts the words up between him and the massive list in his brain, trying to build a blockade out of something he finds familiar and comfortable, and tries to stop interrogating his feelings. This article is less specific; it mentions physical, emotional, and intellectual wants as different facets of sexuality; it tells him to take into consideration the time, the setting, and the people involved. It again mentions possible unwanted emotions and outcomes—risks of pregnancy and STIs aside. It asks him if he feels safe, with this person. With Richie.

(He feels safe with Richie except in the ways that he doesn’t feel safe with Richie, in the way that Richie is unpredictable and can surprise him, can make him _want_. And the _wanting_ feels almost dangerous, because it’s new and unexpected, but Richie…

Richie got up on his pride and fury in the hospital and was snippy to Stan and Mike but not to Patty, and when Eddie demanded his coffee he gave into the distraction without question. He stood out on Ben’s deck and cut where it would hurt when he got scared, but when Eddie wiped out on the bike he jumped at least six feet down without a hesitation and ran to him.)

Eddie suspects that he might be reaching information overload, so he tries to take a step back. He can pace himself. He’s not going to go out and have sex right now, this is all hypothetical.

And the truth is—he has the perspective to consider—he thinks that the reason he wants to have sex with Richie is that he thinks it would be good. He thinks it would be better than all the other sex he’s had.

But this is dependent on a reality in which Richie Tozier is good at sex, and right now Eddie doesn’t have much concrete evidence in that direction, except for Richie messing around with him a little bit while they make out like teenagers. And Eddie’s aware—because he’s reality-checking his expectations here—that in the emotional state he’s currently in, anxious and vulnerable and with something to prove—if he has sex with Richie and it is bad, it will crush him.

It doesn’t mean he’ll love Richie any less—it is extremely difficult to imagine something plausible that would make him love Richie less—but Eddie has a lot emotionally invested in his future potential sex life, and that’s not something he can just throw at Richie and be like _take care of this for me._

So it’s good that now’s not the time to test it.

It would probably be best to hold off, even if his body were in perfect working condition. Eddie should get his feelings in order.

And that’s fine. Really, it is.

The website also tells him that sometimes touching the lips can be a form of masturbation, which blindsides him to the point that he actually moves his charger over to the dresser instead of the nightstand and plugs his phone in over there, so that he has to go to sleep and not spend any more time agonizing. He has officially learned more than he can handle for one night.

(There’s a spot on his nearly nonexistent lower lip that, every time Richie slides his tongue across it, a hot little flash jolts straight down into his stomach. Sometimes the sense memory comes upon him when he’s walking in the mornings, when his brain is scrabbling uselessly for something to focus on other than the physical discomfort of pushing his legs forward. Sometimes he’ll slide into a chair and suddenly that touch and how it makes him feel will bash him over the head, while Richie is across the room talking about fainting goats or something.

He understands the appeal of kissing now, instead of just doing it because you’ve reached that point of a date, or because it’s what you do in front of both your families at an altar, or because you’re supposed to kiss your wife goodbye before you leave for work. His mouth wants the kisses now. He wants Richie poking his tongue into the corners of his mouth and making him shiver.)

He has to get up and reapply his beeswax lip balm because eventually he licks his lower lip dry while he’s trying to fall asleep.

* * *

On the morning of the date, Eddie sleeps in. If they’re going to go shopping there will be a certain amount of walking and a certain amount of standing, and if they’re going to drive there will be a certain amount of muscle engagement. It’s not the same half-hour of cardiac activity that he makes himself do in the mornings, and he will miss out on some of his stretching and coughing exercises while they’re out and about, but he doesn’t want to be too tired to do these things. He wants to be able to enjoy his first date with Richie.

The other reason he sleeps in is because, if he’s unconscious for part of the day, he presumably won’t be able to spend that time being anxious about going on his first date with Richie.

But he’s thwarted. He wakes up—well after dawn, but not late enough to feel like he’s accomplished true sleeping in—because his phone on the dresser is buzzing. The spider plant seems to lean its long leaves over it, as though apologizing for not muffling the vibration. It’s a text tone, not the call tone. Richie finally showed him how to mute his notifications so that he no longer receives annoying series of dings when the Losers’ chat gets active right when he’s trying to take a nap.

He lifts his head, checks the clock, sees that it’s still before eight in the morning. It doesn’t matter. He has time to go back to sleep if he still wants to, so he gets up and checks his phone.

Unsurprisingly, it’s Richie texting him. Eddie didn’t warn him that he would be sleeping in, and that means that Richie’s morning routine is affected too.

Richie: _Eddie Kaspbrak’s Day Off?_

He takes the phone back to bed with him and lies down. His skin’s cool from sleeping on top of the blankets, and the electric blanket powered off in the night again. When he pulls the covers up over his shoulder it feels very indulgent and comfortable.

Eddie: _I’ll be getting plenty of exercise later_

Then he realizes his mistake and quickly adds:

Eddie: _I mean shopping_

Eddie: _I mean, there will be walking and standing then_

But he still groans a little because he knows what’s coming, and Richie proves him right.

Richie: _Sounds like someones making assumptions about what im willing to do on a 1st date_

Eddie pushes his face into the pillow and groans a little more. Well aware he left himself open for that one, he goes on the offensive.

Eddie: _Why do you text like a thirteen-year-old?_

Richie: _Why are you texting 13 year olds_

Eddie: _FUCK YOU_

Richie: _I mean i didnt say your assumptions were wrong_

Eddie, sleepy and a little defensive out of sheer embarrassment, texts back _You’re a tease_ and regrets it the moment his thumb touches the send button. He stares at the screen for long moments, muttering, “Goddamnit,” under his breath and waiting for the typing bubble to indicate that Richie is replying.

Richie takes his sweet time in formulating his response. He leaves Eddie hanging for a full two agonizing minutes, and his response is completely unhelpful, just leaving Eddie to dangle on his own awkwardness.

Richie: _O rlly?_

Eddie whispers, “Fuck,” and pushes his phone away like he’s trying to get out of the blast radius.

So maybe he has sex on the brain. Maybe he had too much on his mind when he went to sleep last night and he should have… done something like downloading a meditation app to clear his thoughts, even though guided meditation has never done anything for him except make him think about how much he hates guided meditation. Whatever. Richie can’t hold him responsible for the things he says when he’s sleepy and unmedicated.

(Richie will never let him live anything down.)

He considers not responding to Richie’s text at all, but then feels like that would be letting Richie win. Which he has done, if his goal was to get Eddie flustered, but there’s no reason he has to know that.

Eddie: _I’m going back to sleep._

Richie: _Sweet dreams_. And then he sends a small picture of a little yellow face blowing a kiss.

He really does try to go back to sleep, but it’s like his brain was lying in wait for him. He has almost nodded off when the idle thought _what will I wear_ floats through his mind and shocks him into full cold unflinching awareness.

He groans again, rolling over to try and lie in a new position without aggravating any of the incisions in his chest, and half-crushes his face into the pillow as though low oxygen can knock him out. Then he gives up and lies with his eyes closed and his head turned toward the center of the bed, wondering what he’s supposed to wear on a date with Richie when the only comfortable shirts available belong to Richie himself.

Eventually he becomes aware that his thoughts are growing foggy and the images of bright patterns flashing through his mind’s eye don’t match up to any of Richie’s actual shirts, and he falls asleep, and does not have to make a liar of himself.

* * *

He does not have sweet dreams.

The recurring nightmares are probably a form of sleep paralysis. The fact that he doesn’t feel like he’s in his body looking out when he has them, he feels like he’s having an out-of-body experience, doesn’t matter. The other day when he had the stress dream where he was very afraid Richie was going to mess with his feet—something Richie would probably do if Eddie presented the idea, but probably wouldn’t do randomly now the way he almost definitely would have when they were kids—is proof he can open his eyes a little, get scraps of information from his environment, and still be dreaming. And the dream doesn’t always have to be right. The last one he had—was it the last one?—he dreamed that Richie was also sleeping, but when he woke up Richie was not just awake, but had his glasses on and was playing on his phone.

So it’s not a reflection of reality, he tells himself, as he finds himself on the other side of the bed beside his own sleeping body. And standing on the other side of the bed is—the other him. The sick one, the one who took off his skin and revealed himself to be just Eddie, all along.

Objectively a psychoanalyst would probably love to sink their teeth into Eddie, just looking at his marriage alone. He’s ripe for the Freudian lens, and he’s gonna avoid potential dream analysis just as aggressively as he avoids thinking about his relationship to his mother and how it’s influenced his perception of women.

Still, he thinks there’s probably something to unpack here. A sleeping body in the middle, his dreaming mind off to the left, and a physical incarnation of all of his fears on the right. And they all look like him.

The other Eddie, the sick Eddie, stands naked next to the bed. Eddie can’t tell who he’s looking at—his vision isn’t that precise in dreams—but just the presence of that body standing over him while he sleeps is plenty unsettling enough. And then there’s the matter of the stitches.

The stitches in his chest are still perfectly in place, barbed wire bracketing above and below the massive stab wound in the center of his chest. Of course that’s clearly visible—would it be a nightmare if the souvenir of his impalement were packaged up neat and antiseptic behind a waterproof bandage? And the bruising is livid, black and brown and purple and red like it’s fresh, like Eddie was just wounded.

But the stitches in his face are missing. This would be unexceptional—the stitches were dissolving, he healed and he doesn’t need them anymore—except that the sick Eddie is freshly wounded. The gash in his cheek gapes open in a way that the neat clean line never did in real life, and fresh blood pours down the side of his face down to his neck. Eddie remembers that sensation, how hot it was as it gushed down to his collar, as Bev gingerly tried to pinch the wound shut, how full his mouth got.

The other Eddie just stares with those familiar big sad downward-turned eyes. His jaw is set in such a way that his thin lower lip almost seems to be pouting. And he bleeds. He’s not doing anything, but he bleeds in arrhythmic gushes. Eddie can’t even chalk them up to an imaginary pulse.

“Can you give me a fucking break?” Eddie demands.

The other him opens his mouth to speak. Blood wells and flows over his lower lip and spills down his chin. “You—”

“Shut up,” Eddie tells him.

He has a date this evening. He’s not going to spend today dwelling on the horrifying experience that was being stabbed in the face. He’s going to spend today dwelling on the horrifying struggle that is dressing like an adult and going on his first date in nine years.

“Go away,” he orders. “Send Richie in. Go ahead and let the door hit you on the way out.”

Between them, the sleeping Eddie adjusts the blanket higher up on his body. He pulls it up to his chin like a kid. A pulse of protectiveness goes through him and Eddie thinks, dimly, that he is being like his mother, he is trying to defend him from illness and threats and the world and things that are out of his control.

It makes him feel… not quite right. Unsettled. Belligerence and aggression was the right move with It, but by invoking Sonia he can feel the misstep, feel that he’s lost ground.

It’s enough to allow the bleeding Eddie to speak. The blood in his mouth doesn’t affect his words, which come out clean and recognizable and mournful, almost whiny. “It’s not fair,” he says. “It’s not fair, you’re never alone, I’m alone.”

Eddie is once again struck by the knowledge that there are three of them in the room, but that by definition, he is alone. He is with himself. Solo.

_Be your own first partner,_ the article advised, but much as Eddie might have joked about sending Richie in for a sex dream, but he feels faintly nauseated and deeply unnerved and he just wants this to be over.

So instead he mocks him.

“Bowers is in my room,” he says, doing a Voice, trying to mimic the absurd confusion of the moment. “That’s what you said. You’re getting it wrong. _Bowers is in my room._ ”

But Bowers is not in his room. This is Ben’s room, in Ben’s house, and Eddie is safe here—Ben made these walls, and Eddie is safe, and Richie is in the next room, and Richie fucking killed Bowers, and Ben threw himself between Eddie and the fortune cookies in the restaurant, and Eddie is safe. It’s just a room. He’s just here in a room with himself.

“I’m alone,” the sick Eddie complains again.

“No,” Eddie says, putting his foot down. “You want to reenact this bullshit? Say your fucking lines.” _Richie, make it sit._

The other him sulks. “Bowers is in my room,” he says quietly, like Eddie is forcing him to.

Because Eddie is forcing him to. He knows that tone—that reluctant mumble—because he knows it from arguments with Myra, where he knew he was in the wrong and he knew what the _right_ thing to say was, even if he didn’t want to say it.

_Sorry, Mommy,_ Eddie said at thirteen as he flew out the front door.

What would he do if he dreamed of himself as a child? Not being a kid again, but young Eddie in front of him? He remembers how he felt when Richie sneered about himself in the kitchen—how if anyone else had said that about Richie, at any age, Eddie wouldn’t have tolerated it. How his ears rang and, despite that it was Richie himself talking, his first instinct was _don’t you fucking say that about him_.

“Not like that,” Eddie presses. “You’ve been living with Richie Tozier for how long? You know how to do a Voice.”

“Bowers is in my room,” the other Eddie says again, and fresh blood gushes down his face.

With a horrible sinking feeling of knowing what comes next in a dream, Eddie brings his hand up to touch his own throat. When he pulls it away the palm is red with blood, too bright to be real, like he just slathered it in paint. Red, blood, contamination— _he is like this and now he has made me like this too._

And when he looks up to see the other Eddie—he’s smiling. The other Eddie is smiling, his teeth bright white and unstained by the blood in his mouth, happy to watch him bleed.

_Oh god,_ Eddie thinks. _Oh god, help me_.

Bright red blood, blood that doesn’t fade, blood that doesn’t rust—blood shining thin and red over a clouded glass window, and a rag swiping through it to wipe it away. Tipping out the bucket in the bathtub, and then not knowing what to do with the rags when they were done.

“Bev,” Eddie says slowly. He just thought of her—she’s fresh in his mind, flustered but still polished in her black blazer and white blouse, her face crinkled with concern as she leaned over him in the hallway. Bev can help him, Bev was always strong and unflinching when the rest of them were frightened, Bev saw him bleeding and reached out to try and staunch the—and Stan, saying _apply pressure, numbnuts,_ and Richie holding a leather jacket to his chest wound and hoisting Eddie up, just a _starburst_ of pain in his skull, over his eyes, and then Eddie can’t see anything except Richie’s shoulder, tunnel vision on that filthy yellow shirt turning red, and—

“He’s in my room,” Eddie says, but his lung is collapsing. “He’s in my room, he’s in my room, he’s in my room! He’s in my room! _He’s in my room!_ ”

* * *

The door rips through the frame, swings, bounces off the backstop, and Richie lurches through just in time for it to hit him in the shoulder. Eddie jolts up, stab of pain muted by his sheer panic. They stare at each other, each abbreviated mid-motion, and the aftershocks of pain thud through Eddie’s chest in time with his panicked breathing. He can’t feel anything—it’s just pain, and he’s had pain in his sleep before—he can’t feel anything.

“Eddie,” Richie says, dropping down to his knees beside the bed— _right where the other Eddie stood and watched him bleed_. “Eddie, it’s a nightmare. Okay? It’s not real.”

He clings to the edge of the bed; his numb hand has turned into a claw and he _can’t feel anything_ , it’s like the morphine all over again, he can’t catch his breath and—

He doesn’t so much lie back down as collapse back onto the pillow. The top of his head scrapes the headboard and he feels flat pressure, but no pain, just _cold_.

“I can’t feel anything,” he gasps. His breaths seem to rip through him, he can hear them tearing his throat. “I can’t feel anything, I can’t—it’s too much, I can’t—”

“Hey, hey, hey,” Richie says again, voice turned soothing. “I’m gonna touch your hand, okay? Is that all right?”

But the hand nearest to Richie is the numb one, the one with the nerve damage from when he _fucking died_ , and Eddie’s not going to be able to feel anything with it anyway—

Richie pushes his fingers between the spread claw of Eddie’s right hand and—Eddie feels that. Feels how thick Richie’s fingers are, how his fingertips push into the back of Eddie’s hand and hold him tight. Eddie whispers, “Fuck,” and squeezes back as hard as he can.

“There you go,” Richie says. “Can you feel that?” He pushes his hand a little harder into Eddie’s, prying him up from his death grip on the sheets until their palms are pressed together. His skin is warm.

“I,” Eddie says, still entirely at the mercy of his chest rising and falling. “I—”

And then he breaks, going completely limp. He drops his other hand over his eyes so that he doesn’t have to see Richie seeing him like this.

_“Fuck!”_

“There you go,” Richie says again, relief creeping into his voice.

“Fucking shit, I—”

He remembers he’s half-naked and reaches out, his eyes shut, to find the other side of the blanket and pull it over his bare chest. He’d like to cocoon up in it and hide completely. The blanket is an improvement; as soon as it’s over him he realizes that he was fucking freezing, and now he’s covered in cold sweat. His head is still reeling from waking that quickly from sleep, and his heart is rabbiting away in his chest, and he’s definitely hyperventilating. But he’s here, in the blanket, and he can feel _warmth_ , and he can feel Richie’s touch.

“Okay,” he sighs. Inhale. “Okay.”

“All right,” Richie echoes, almost amiably.

Eddie lets himself just hold his hand while he tries to figure out what the hell that was. Nightmare, obviously, but he woke up convinced that he was in the hospital again. He knew where he was, but he felt so numb and frightened, his thoughts were about morphine. And… blood loss.

“I’m sorry,” he sighs again.

“No, man, you’re good,” Richie says. “Sorry I like—Kool-Aid Manned through your door. You were—screaming.”

“Oh,” Eddie says. He’s never known himself to talk in his sleep. Myra’s never said anything about it. He swallows. “What was I screaming?”

Richie pauses for a moment and then says, “You weren’t really, uh, enunciating, so if you could work on that the next time you have fucking screaming nightmares, that would be really helpful for me, at least—”

“Are you lying to me?” Eddie asks, incredulous. He doesn’t know why he thinks so, but something about the babbling makes him think… He opens his eyes and looks at Richie.

Richie is staring at him. “No,” he says, his eyes wide in turn. “I just mean—you sounded like you were underwater, dude, the only thing I got was ‘room.’”

Eddie takes a moment to consider what Richie, Ben, and Bev may have discussed while he was in the hospital. He closes his eyes again. “Sorry,” he says. “Sorry, I don’t know why I asked that.”

“I mean—” Richie gives a short little laugh, sounding awkward. “Not like it’s an unfair question. I can probably guess, but—”

“It wasn’t Bowers,” he says.

He’s aware of pressure at his temples—it feels like something is _squeezing_ his head. He gets his left elbow under him and tries to sit up, slowly, hissing. Richie doesn’t help him, which Eddie appreciates. He has half an impulse to hold the blanket to his chest and hide his wounds, but that would require letting go of Richie’s hand, so he just lets it kind of slide down a little, exposing his shoulders. A pulse of pain passes through him and he grimaces until it goes, then tilts his head, stretching the tendons in his neck.

“Apparently even in my sleep I knew you killed the fucker, so I was like, not worried at all about Bowers,” he admits, and then immediately considers that maybe Richie has some complicated feelings about the murder, however justified. “Sorry,” he says again.

“I mean, the fucker stabbed you,” Richie says, sounding like he’s quoting Eddie word for word, so it comes off a little distant. “So I guess you’re allowed to feel about that however you want to.”

“Is that right?” He lets himself smile a little.

“Yeah, I think that’s how that works,” Richie says.

Eddie gives a short laugh and winces a little as his ribs ache in response. He definitely feels like he’s been screaming, his throat a little raw.

“Did you carry me out?” he asks Richie.

Silence.

Then:

“When?” Richie asks.

And he’s definitely lying now, if he’s pretending not to know what Eddie’s talking about. Eddie glares at him.

Richie ducks his head a little, guilty, resigned. “Okay, okay. I—it’s complicated.”

Eddie lets his face twist up in incredulity. How can it be complicated? They were in the sewers, and then Eddie took a _fatal wound_ , and somehow he woke up in a hospital. Clearly something had to happen between point A and point B.

“I carried you,” Richie says. “I think you held on part of the way, too, it was—I was carrying you, and I could have sworn you were holding on. Not, like, to life or whatever, but, like, to me. And I thought, _oh, that’s good, because if he were dead, he couldn’t hang on_. But—I think I was just kidding myself.” He swallows. “But there was… climbing. And the place was coming down around us. And—we had to stop, and Stan tied your wrists together and was like _this is how you carry an unconscious person,_ fucking Boy Scout, and I was scared to see if you had a pulse. You were—there was—”

“I think I remembered,” Eddie says, to stop Richie from what is clearly approaching visible panic. If he thinks about it—dizziness. Tunnel vision. Richie’s shoulder in that yellow shirt. “Maybe. I don’t know. It could be a dream.”

Richie is quiet for a moment and then Eddie feels the pressure on his hand tighten. “You were dead,” he says. “I’m pretty sure you were dead, when we got you out. Mike called the ambulance and we did… Stan and I did CPR, but. I think you were dead.”

Eddie considers the trauma of his injury and how long it took them to crawl down to Its lair in the first place. _Yes_ , he thinks. Yes, it seems very likely that he would have died en route, before they even got out. And then they’d be literally dragging his dead weight.

And here he is.

“I mean,” Eddie says. “We both know how often impossible things have happened to us.”

“Yeah,” Richie says, and looks down. There’s a flush starting on his face; his nose is turning red. “Yeah, fuckton of impossible things. I never suffocated to death under your mom—”

“Jesus Christ,” Eddie says.

Richie sniffs and then says, “Hey, are you good?”

“Yeah,” Eddie says. “Yeah, I’m fine. You got me out, I’m—I’m fine.”

“No, I mean—” Richie slowly draws his hand back, and Eddie relaxes his fingers and lets him go. “I gotta—” Newly freed, he jerks his thumb over his shoulder. “I’ll be right back.”

Weirdly, Eddie’s first thought is that Richie might have left something on the stove. He watches him go—he’s still wearing those red flannel pajama pants—and then he hears the door to the hallway bathroom shut, and the vent come on, and the muffled but distinct sound of retching and coughing.

“Okay,” Eddie says to himself.

He gets up, walks past the closed bathroom door with his fingers in his ears, and gets Richie some water from the kitchen. Then he doesn’t know what to do, standing shirtless in the hallway with a glass of water, listening to the sounds of Richie cleaning up and brushing his teeth through the door. The fan is definitely running, but he can hear the sink, and then Richie gargling.

Richie looks surprised when he actually opens the door and Eddie is standing there. His face is a little flushed, but otherwise he looks functionally no different than before he left Eddie’s room. Eddie briefly considers a world in which it’s possible that Richie has been sneaking out to puke after agitating conversations this whole time, and this is just the first time that Eddie’s caught him.

He holds the glass out to Richie.

“Thanks,” Richie says, eyes wide. Bewildered. Like he’s surprised that Eddie would do the same things for him that Richie’s been doing this whole time.

Eddie blinks once, feeling awkward, and then says, “I’m gonna go put a shirt on and—”

Richie seems to cope with the uncertainty about what to do now by taking too large a gulp of water and choking on it. Coughing, he nods at Eddie and gestures for him to return to his room.

Eddie goes back in and puts on his pajama shirt, because at this point it doesn’t matter what Richie sees him wearing and he’s not going to go through the ordeal of getting dressed properly. He sort of considers dragging his blanket out to the couch, because he has ideas about folding Richie up in it with him, but he doesn’t necessarily know what Richie needs right now. Doesn’t know what most people need when they’re feeling off like that, to be honest, because almost everything almost anyone has ever done for him when he’s _sick_ has been the wrong thing. He doesn’t want to do the wrong thing.

He comes back out to the living room. Richie’s on the couch and he looks almost surprised to see him up and moving, but he says nothing as Eddie walks to the fridge and pulls out one of the infinite containers of fruit salad and a fork. Richie keeps buying it pre-cut from the grocery store despite that it costs extra money not to slice your own fruit salad, and then he makes Fruit Ninja jokes despite that he had to explain to Eddie what Fruit Ninja is in the first place. He returns to the couch and hovers a little bit at the empty end.

“Can I just—?” he asks.

“Of course, man.” Richie moves his legs so that there’s room for Eddie to sit down and stretch out if he wants.

So he does. He sits with his back to the arm of the leather couch and pushes his feet up against Richie’s hip, prodding at him with his toes. He eats his fruit and waits for Richie to speak, but he doesn’t. There’s one moment where Richie hovers his hand over Eddie’s ankles and then pats at the joint gently, but that’s all.

“Come on, Richie,” Eddie says at last, exasperated.

Richie looks up at him and his eyes go from distant to focused at once. It’s very weird, watching him surface from the depths of his own head. He pushes both hands through his hair and makes it stand up wildly.

“What do you want me to say?” Richie asks.

“When has that ever mattered?” Eddie returns. Richie’s never needed prompting to talk, it’s always been something he does like breathing. His silence is more disconcerting. He taps at Richie’s hip with his toes again. “We lived. We made it.”

It’s not lost on him that Richie is more bothered by the whole death thing than Eddie is. It’s difficult to comprehend—so many things happened after he lost consciousness, after he was second-guessing the last thing he said before Richie’s face faded away in front of him, cursing himself for being a coward, wanting to tell Richie exactly how it felt, wanting almost to preach with that curious clarity blood loss gave him. To Eddie, death feels exactly like a collapsing lung, or exactly like a morphine overdose, or exactly like breaking his arm. It happened; it was out of his control; it isn’t happening now. He can do whatever he wants to try and stop it from happening again, but it’s like the goddamn Yellowstone caldera.

There was room for him, in the space in his body filled up with pain. It didn’t white him out, it didn’t obliterate him. He remembers suddenly understanding what it was to be _clean_ , how it felt, how he understood that he’d been wrong about everything this whole time, that his fears were meaningless—and he knows now that that was the start of a timer, at the end of which his heart stopped beating. But in that space between epiphany and fading out entirely—that was him.

“Yeah,” Richie says quietly. He’s still staring down at the tops of Eddie’s feet. “We made it.”

Maybe pushing the issue isn’t the answer. Maybe it’ll make Richie throw up again.

He pushes his toes more snugly under Richie’s thighs to keep warm. The fruit is cold from the fridge; when he rests the container carefully on his chest it numbs his incisions a little bit. His teeth ache. He needs to get that goddamn tooth taken care of.

“I know what happened,” Eddie says. “I just—I don’t want to waste any more time on it. I—” He has to grit his teeth suddenly against the wave of frustration that rolls over him. “I want to go to dinner with you.”

Richie blinks and at last looks up at him. “Right now?” he asks.

“No, I’m eating,” Eddie replies. Of course he doesn’t mean right now, it’s morning. “Unless you don’t feel up to going? Because we can reschedule.”

It’s strange, to have all the time in the world and to also be forty years old, almost forty-one, and to know that the global life expectancy is seventy-two years, under seventy for men. He aches from it—the knowledge that he and Richie should have had their whole lives together, and instead that time was _stolen_ from them by some kind of cosmic confluence of horror and destiny.

“I’m fine,” Richie says. His eyes are very wide and dark, and there’s a stray strand of his hair falling across his forehead.

Eddie loves him so much it hurts.

Richie leans back a little on the couch and pushes his hand through his hair again, drawing that little curl up into a spike. “Sorry,” he says. “Sorry, that’s not how—I really know how to set a mood, huh?”

Eddie raises an eyebrow at him. He becomes aware that there’s still a piece of pineapple impaled on his fork that he’s been neglecting, and he crams it into his mouth as he asks, “Are you trying to set a mood?” If so, Eddie talking with his mouth full isn’t doing anything to resuscitate it.

“Well, I hear I’m a tease,” Richie says.

Eddie narrows his eyes at him and keeps eating his pineapple. He’s on a couch with his feet in Richie’s lap, so he doesn’t need to worry about table manners. “You don’t say.”

“Yeah, apparently I promise a dude a night of five-star entertainment, department store shopping back to back with Thai food in the middle of nowhere, and instead I blow chunks.”

“Oh, five-star entertainment?” Eddie repeats. “I don’t think any of your shows have gotten more than three stars.”

Richie grins suddenly. “You looked at my ratings?”

He swallows his mouthful of pineapple. “Obviously I looked at your ratings. The shows don’t deserve them, I don’t know what the fuck everybody else was watching.”

Richie snickers. “Fuck what I said about setting a mood, just eviscerate my whole career a little more.”

Eddie doesn’t know if the logic to this argument is that Richie gets turned on by being bullied (which seems likely) or that Eddie does a fine enough job ruining a mood without Richie’s help. His ribs hurt. It’s his bruised ego.

“Hey, can I say something?” he asks.

Immediately Richie tenses—he’s sitting on Eddie’s feet, and Eddie can feel him shift his weight. “Yeah,” he says, doing an excellent job of sounding casual.

Oh Jesus. Maybe Eddie should do what he did in the hospital, change what he’s about to say when he can tell Richie’s starting to panic. But then the danger of Richie just walking out of the hospital room was very real and present—he left his phone behind that one time, he was so upset, he didn’t even stick around to see what Eddie was going to do with one very valuable smartphone.

No, Eddie tells himself, weighing the risks. Richie’s probably not going to leave. And not just because he just got sick and he might be a little weak from it, but because they’re in the middle of nowhere and Richie isn’t going to abandon Eddie right now. He has to have faith in that.

He swallows, takes a deep breath, and scrunches his eyes shut to get the words out. “I know I can be demanding.”

Richie snorts.

Eddie cracks an eyelid to glare at him and say, “Fuck you.”

“No, by all means, continue,” Richie says. “This is something I didn’t know about you.”

Eddie pushes one foot forward, not exactly kicking Richie but shoving deeper under his legs into the couch. His heels, which are like sandpaper, scrape across the leather. “Shush,” he instructs, and then shuts his eyes again. “I know I just said—I do want to go to dinner with you. But… I feel a little weird, because you said that you don’t date, and I can’t have sex, and now you’re taking me on a date.”

Richie is very still.

It’s unlike him, how still he is.

“So like if you’re just trying to—to humor me, you don’t have to,” Eddie says. “And if you don’t want to go today, I’m serious, we can reschedule, we don’t have to go if you don’t want. I know I just said the thing about—about wasting time, but.” He opens his eyes and in lieu of finishing that point, waves his fork a little and stabs a blueberry.

Richie is quiet for a long moment, unmoving, large and dark in Eddie’s peripheral vision. Then he asks, “Do you not want to go on a date?” His voice is very careful in a way Eddie doesn’t usually associate with Richie.

“No, I just said I want to go on a date,” Eddie says quickly. And it baffles him how much he wants it, when he hasn’t been on a date in at least nine years. His chest tightens a little bit when he thinks about it, but when he thinks about _not_ going on a date with Richie, it tightens even more. _Almost forty-one._ There’s no such thing as making up for lost time, because time is a finite resource. But he’d like to spend the rest of his life just hanging out with Richie, if given the choice.

The thought gives him the nerve to look at Richie. Richie is holding tight to his arm of the couch as though he’s afraid the whole piece of furniture is about to buck him off.

“Do you want to have sex?” he asks in the exact same tone, as though trying frantically to understand.

Eddie flushes. “That’s not what I’m saying,” he says, because he still isn’t totally clear on the answer and he’s certainly not about to discuss it right now, not while it’s a nonissue. He swallows and blurts out, “I feel weird that you’re doing something that you—you wouldn’t otherwise do. It feels like. Because I… can’t.”

“Can’t have sex,” Richie says again, in a tone that’s like _just to clarify_.

“ _Yes_ , Richie, I can’t have sex,” Eddie says, staring down into his bowl of rapidly-dwindling fruit. He just woke up from a nightmare in which he might have remembered bleeding out, and Richie puked. He’s sure that, in his life, there have been moments when he has felt even less sexy than this, but right now he can’t come up with any.

The silence while Richie processes that is unbearable. Then he breaks it to ask, “Do you think that I don’t _want_ to go on a date with you?”

“I mean, I would understand,” Eddie says quickly.

Physical illness aside—and if Richie just vomited, maybe he shouldn’t aggravate his system by adding red pepper flakes or… rich and flavorful foods to the problem. Unless that’s Sonia Kaspbrak’s logic? But Richie’s not out, and Richie’s sort of a celebrity, and while upstate New York isn’t Los Angeles or even New York City, he got recognized in _Derry, Maine_ , a town so small that even all the child murders went unnoticed for centuries.

So Eddie doesn’t know how _demonstrative_ Richie’s going to want to be at dinner, or if he’s going to treat Eddie no differently than if he were taking Bill or Mike or Stan out to dinner, or if Richie’s going to be looking over his shoulder the entire time. Eddie doesn’t want to add that particular stress to his plate.

And Eddie doesn’t _need_ Richie to be out in order to date him. Richie has a career, and Eddie’s not about to ask him to jeopardize both his livelihood and his personal safety. He likes hanging out with Richie, and he doesn’t mind if that’s all it’s going to look like in public. He’s never approved very much of PDA—though admittedly he’s seen very little gay PDA in his life, for what he assumes are obvious reasons. Richie’s his best friend, and Eddie decided when he was thirteen that he would be happy to hang out with Richie every day for the rest of his life. That facet of his personality seems to still be intact, after everything.

“Oh my god, I want to go on a date with you so bad I couldn’t even _ask you_.” Richie sounds fucking astounded. “That wasn’t me, like, trying to bribe you into eating Thai food with me, or… trying to give you a reason to say no, asking if you felt like taking a two-hour drive to some place with the dubious culinary reviews of _Ben Hanscom, soup eater_. I’m _nervous_.” There’s almost a laugh on the last words, Richie either mocking himself or instinctively trying to break the tension.

Eddie looks up at him, bewildered. “Why? It’s me.”

Richie has seen him in all manner of indignities since Derry. Eddie can’t even be in the room with him while he’s getting sick, bringing him a glass of water after Richie’s already taken care of himself. What is the point in being nervous around Eddie?

The expression Richie’s giving him suggests his head is on the verge of exploding. He gestures at Eddie’s whole body from the other side of the couch. “Fucking _because_ it’s you, dumbass,” he says. “You think I _wanted_ to go on a date with anyone else? I didn’t care what they ate. Well—” The dirty joke passes over his face like a cloud and then clears immediately as Richie refocuses. Eddie watches the tangent go by in real time, fascinated. Richie shakes his head. “They didn’t matter. You matter. Fuck.”

“You matter,” Eddie spits back, unable to come up with anything to say that isn’t _no, you!_

“Well—good!” Richie mimes an explosion with both hands and then slumps back into the couch. “Jesus. I guess we’re gonna have a fucking good time eating some food I didn’t make, then!”

“You don’t have to make all of the food,” Eddie says.

“I don’t mind making all the food, I just thought you might be getting sick of it.”

“I’m not sick of it, I’m sick of watching you put maple syrup on potatoes.”

Richie’s starting to grin, but he rolls his eyes theatrically. “I see how it is. We start dating and now you want to change me.”

“I want to change the condiments you put on potatoes, it’s weird.”

“You’re weird.”

“ _You’re_ weird!”

“I know, that’s why I put maple syrup on potatoes!”

Eddie sighs, his headache pounding in his temples. “I can’t believe I’m letting you pick where we get dinner.”

Richie grins wider. His left eye is crinkled up, happy. “I mean, you can pick if you know somewhere else you’d rather go.”

“I don’t,” Eddie says. “Where the fuck are you taking me to buy shirts, though? I’m not sure if I trust your judgment there.”

“You like my shirts,” Richie says smugly. “You’d rather wear my shirts than Stan’s.”

Eddie stuffs the last half-strawberry into his mouth and sets the empty container down on the table. “Obviously,” he mutters, and folds his arms across his chest. It hurts a little, like a stretch. He breathes through it, thinking. “But we have to do laundry first.”

The only shirt he thinks might be acceptable to wear on a date is the one with the lizards on it, because the pattern is so small and interwoven that it looks feathery, and that’s in the wash. And he’d really just rather Richie carry the basket down the stairs to the laundry room for him, because the idea of Richie washing his underwear for him is deeply upsetting.

“You know how to set a mood, Kaspbrak,” Richie says. Then he loops one arm under both of Eddie’s knees and pulls his feet out from under him. Eddie yelps, grabbing onto the couch for stability, but Richie just drops his feet into his lap and sits there with his hands on Eddie’s ankles, looking pleased with himself.

“Well,” Eddie says, and then doesn’t know what to say after that. He rubs at his forearms.

“Are you cold?” Richie asks.

“No.” He’s fine. He feels it. He's not cold at all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Eddie meditates on his dissatisfaction with his sex life as a married man and seeks sex education resources for ideas about where to start now that he feels desire for sex. He remembers an afternoon where, as a teen, he thought about kissing someone with glasses (though he didn't realize he was thinking about Richie). He concludes that right now his emotional investment in good sex with Richie is so high that, if he doesn't enjoy their first time, he will be unreasonably emotionally devastated. He's bothered by this, but honestly he's not in fit state to have sex right now anyway, so he puts that on a shelf for now.
> 
> Eddie's sex education resources are from [Scarleteen](https://www.scarleteen.com/) [(1)](https://www.scarleteen.com/article/bodies/10_of_the_best_things_you_can_do_for_your_sexual_self_at_any_age), [(2)](https://www.scarleteen.com/article/advice/yes_no_maybe_so_a_sexual_inventory_stocklist).
> 
> In other news... this fic is getting so long I'm worried I'm going to have to break it into 2 parts. I know where the split will happen, if I go through with it, but like... jeez. And I still mean to get around to writing the Stan/Patty companion piece. What have I gotten myself into since November?


	19. Anything You Decide

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Shopping happens. Poker, bluffing, and shirts coming on and off.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's been a while since I updated, so here's a nice long chapter to make up for it.
> 
> Content warnings: suggestive content; discussion of nude photos and references to the unauthorized distribution of other people's nude photos without their consent; 1 Grindr joke; beards (hair) and beards (socioromantic); references to _RENT_ and _Cool Hand Luke_ ; references to cancer; 1 Pennywise joke in poor taste; Richie's rejection-sensitive dysphoria leads him to assume that Eddie's problems are about him; reference to intimate partner violence (Bev); Eddie has weird ideas about masculinity, flowers, and the color pink; teasing. A fairly fluffy chapter as far as this fic goes, tbh.

To keep his mind off his impending date, Eddie comes up with a list of things to do. First and foremost is making sure he has a clean shirt to wear, so he makes Richie carry the laundry basket down the stairs for him. Stooping to lift things doesn’t quite work for him, his shoulders don’t want to support any real weight, and stairs are a trial at best. This means he hovers oddly behind Richie, pointing him to the basket and then following him awkwardly as he goes down the stairs. Richie, for his part, pretends not to notice that Eddie has to use the banister to drag himself back up the stairs.

He waits for his heart rate to return to normal before he takes a shower. He has the forethought to think that he should be careful he doesn’t have a repeat of the near-faint. When he is wet and naked, he remembers that the shirt he plans to wear is currently downstairs in Ben’s washing machine. So, wearing only a towel, he speedwalks back to his guest room to put pants on. Then he wears the towel like a cloak over his shoulders as he creeps downstairs to change the wash.

Richie is in the living room, little more than a dark shape perched on one of the armchairs as Eddie breezes by. “Are you being weird?” he calls over Eddie’s shoulder as Eddie descends.

 _“I am not being weird,”_ Eddie says, voice coming out kind of strangled and definitely, definitely weird. It’s fine.

Richie cackles with laughter. Sometimes living with him is like living with a supervillain.

He puts the wet clothes in the dryer without inspecting them for stains that need a second go-round. By the time he realizes this, he’s halfway up the stairs again and the machine is thundering pleasantly from below him. It’s too much effort to turn around and do it all properly, so he just keeps dragging himself up the stairs with his left hand, clutching his towel protectively at his throat with his right.

Unsurprisingly Richie is still in the living room, but now Eddie can see that his glasses are perched on top of his head and he’s covering his eyes with one long hand.

“Oh, fuck you,” Eddie says automatically. Richie starts laughing again. At a loss for anything else to do but feeling the need to restore equilibrium somehow, he says, “Get the cards. I’m going to put a shirt on.”

“Sir, yes, sir,” Richie says, turning his shielding hand into an insouciant salute. He looks at Eddie without a trace of shame. After all, he is far-sighted. He can see Eddie perfectly well as he retreats back to his guest room to put his pajama shirt back on—which he should have just given up and done in the first place.

It’s not that Eddie’s _afraid_ of Richie seeing him naked. He’s not _afraid_ of Richie, and _shy_ isn’t the right word either, because he’s a forty-year-old man, almost forty-one, and forty-year-old men don’t get shy. But he hates for Richie to look at his injuries any more than he has to. And there’s a kind of vulnerability to it. Some men take their shirts off and wander around in summer heat without hesitation. Eddie’s never been one of them.

(Eddie strongly suspects that Richie is that kind of man. It’s not that he thinks about at length, but Richie lives in California, and all of his t-shirts look too tight to be comfortable, and he didn’t even look a bit self-conscious when Eddie saw him in a towel while he shaved. Eddie can’t decide if his complete lack of embarrassment is better or worse.)

He comes back wearing light gray trousers from his work wardrobe, and the navy and white pajama shirt. He knows that he looks ridiculous, but at least he feels armored. Richie sets up Texas Hold ’Em at the table without comment.

Eddie is still very bad at poker. This perplexes him. Based on his familiarity with statistical probabilities—and it’s not like cards are Eddie’s skillset, but there are professional poker players who are experts in the field—he feels he ought to be better at the game. He remembers that Richie was always upsettingly good at math, and it’s possible that Richie plays poker a lot for stakes higher than bags of Skittles. But because Eddie knows Richie very well (he thinks he knows Richie very well, anyway), he feels like he should be able to tell when Richie is bluffing. He should know what it looks like, sounds like, when Richie’s just trying to goad him into folding.

And then Eddie’s painkillers kick in and everything goes foggy and relaxed and Eddie has a last moment of painful clarity where he thinks, _Wow, I really need to look out for opioid dependence_. Not that he’s always been judicious about his pill usage, but now he actually has a physical problem that can be affected by pharmaceuticals. He needs to keep an eye out, to make sure that he doesn’t try to close that particular feedback loop.

Richie starts chuckling when Eddie goes lax in his chair. “You look like you got brained with a frying pan,” he says. “Like, the most cartoon possible interpretation of it. You’re a cartoon character.”

Eddie scowls at him, but it’s more for show than for real irritation. The thing is, he doesn’t _want_ to fold. It’s not like he’s clinging to hope of a better hand. He knows enough to know that you have to play the cards you have, and not wait for better ones.

And he’s terrible at playing with Richie in particular, because his first instinct with Richie is always to double down and raise the stakes and get vehement even when his hand is worth absolutely nothing. Playing with Richie has always been _fun_.

And Richie—doesn’t care about the game. He’s visibly enjoying watching Eddie get worked up, posture going looser and smile getting wider the more he catches Eddie staring too long at the almost elegant flicks of his fingers. He lies with impunity and tries to badger him into folding. But if Eddie folds and Richie was bluffing, Richie will laugh at him for believing him.

“I don’t know, Eds,” Richie says grandiosely, turning the cards in the center of the table over one by one. “I’ve got a royal flush here. You’d probably better give up now.”

Eddie snorts and throws a purple Skittle into the pot.

They had to print out lists of poker hands in order of rank, because Eddie’s familiar enough to recognize them and their logic but not familiar enough to know which flush is worth more than which straight. But this time Eddie knows that Richie’s bullshitting him. He has—he checks the guide—a full house, three aces and two kings, and since he has at least one of every suit in his hand right now, Richie has to be lying.

The casual way Richie lies to him is a little chilling, actually.

Richie whistles through his front teeth. “Okay, okay.” He matches Eddie’s Skittle, which means that Eddie has to throw in another one to watch the corners of Richie’s mouth stretch further, and then they go back and forth throwing Skittles into the pot until Eddie runs out. Then Richie turns his hand over. “Read ’em and weep, Eds.”

It is, in fact, a royal flush. He has an ace and a king of hearts.

Which are the same cards Eddie has in his hand.

Eddie screeches and throws his cards down so the evidence is undeniable between them. “Were you cheating this whole time?” he demands. “Give me your fucking Skittles, we’re starting over.”

Richie cracks up so hard that he leans dangerously out of his chair. “There are two decks in here,” he says when he catches his breath. “Can’t you tell there are two decks in here?”

“Why would there be two decks in here?” Eddie demands, furious. “Why would I think, _huh, there might be multiple decks_? Fuck you!”

Richie is laughing so hard now that he has to cling to the back of his chair to stay upright. Eddie reaches across the table and rakes the entire pot towards him, and then he lurches forward across the table and goes for Richie’s stash of Skittles too, while he’s at it. Richie just laughs his idiot head off the whole time, sitting there uselessly as Eddie takes the cards into his own hands and starts sorting out the two decks. He feels like an idiot for not having realized how thick the stack is.

He might be throwing the cards at him a little. Having something to grouch about is always preferable to being nervous and fluttery, so he lets himself take comfort in winging them towards Richie, big target that he is.

Richie seems to find the projectiles extremely funny, because it takes him a long time to calm down and gather up the scattered cards Eddie bounced off him. He handles them far more deftly than Eddie, whose dominant hand is still half numb, but Eddie has the advantage of a headstart in his sorting. When he finishes he folds his arms and scowls at Richie across the table.

“I’d suggest we start another round, but I seem to have been robbed,” Richie says.

“It’s your own fault for eating your chips,” Eddie says from atop his pile of Richie’s Skittles.

Richie sticks his tongue out at him and it is, past a certain point, purple and red with food dye. Eddie’s aware that that’s the joke, but it doesn’t stop him from flushing.

Instead Richie keeps his eyes on the cards he gathers up into his hand, and then when he has the last one he spreads his fingers wide around the deck, turns it somehow, and then drops it into his other palm. Eddie frowns at the movement, but it isn’t until Richie taps the deck on the table to even them out that Eddie realizes what he just saw was Richie shuffling one-handed.

He gasps. It’s completely involuntary. He has an idea that if he were sober he’d be embarrassed about it, but as it is he thinks, _ah, well_ and lets it go.

Richie stills. “What?”

“Did you just—?”

He looks from Richie’s hand to his face and back again. Richie’s shoulders relax and the corners of his mouth start to twitch like he’s fighting a smile. All at once Eddie remembers—an improvised stage in the Toziers’ backyard, a repurposed shower curtain, _The Amazing Ricardo!_

“Your _fucking_ magic tricks!” he thunders.

“Yeah?” Richie asks, his suppressed smile turning into a smirk.

He’s showing off. He’s just showing off.

“Do that again,” Eddie says, despite an eight-year-old self howling at him down the years not to encourage him. “Show me.”

It turns out that card tricks—the ones Richie learned out of books when they were in grade school and obsessively practiced to no avail—work much better when his hands are big enough to hold the deck. And—as Richie demonstrates in slow motion—his hands are big enough now not just to hold the deck, but to split it and hold both halves side by side, one between his pointer finger and thumb, the other between his pointer finger and pinkie. And he’s dexterous enough to twist the cards away from each other with a single finger, and then bend the deck with his hand and fan them together.

Why the _fuck_ are his hands that big? Why the _fuck_ has he been practicing card tricks for his career as a goddamn _standup comedian_?

And Eddie’s far more interested in Richie’s dumb card tricks now than he was when they were in second grade—when Richie had a plastic cauldron and a cheap hat and got so incredibly frustrated when things didn’t work the way they were supposed to that Eddie was too embarrassed to look at him.

Now he’s kind of mad that Richie can do this trick. He still feels a little bit like he should shove him, like he should knock the cards out of his hand—his _fucking huge hand_ —like he should climb into Richie’s lap and get his hands in his shirt and—

Oh. That’s not anger.

“Is this doing it for you?” Richie asks in mixed incredulity and glee. “Because when I was like twenty I thought this was how I was gonna get guys to notice me at parties, and I would _love_ for that long con to pay off.”

“Fuck _off_ ,” Eddie says, trying to cope with this new and extremely stupid variant of sexual attraction. To punish Richie for being here to witness him in this state, he eats a handful of Skittles, chomping down on them hard.

* * *

The dryer sings when it’s done. Eddie walks downstairs and puts the lizard shirt on without bothering to take any of the rest of the clothes out. He can worry about that later. Instead he fusses with his collar and then drags himself back upstairs to the bathroom and his toiletry kit. There he ruthlessly trims, tweezes, pops, and moisturizes his face. He considers gelling his hair, but lifting his arms up that high is still uncomfortable, and he doesn’t want to have to take another shower before bed to rinse it out later.

And Richie likes how his hair looks when it’s clean.

He needs a haircut. They’re approaching October, and little tufts have grown in at the nape of his neck, little wings over his ears. Normally he has a haircut every eight weeks. During his morning routine he’ll notice those little points of overlong hair, and then he’ll get a phone call from the hairdresser reminding him that he has an appointment on Monday.

He hasn’t gotten a phone call, but his phone is also in the bottom of the Derry sewer system.

He imagines leaning back in the chair so that someone can wash his hair, and the pressure that would put on his chest and injuries. He imagines trying to clean the little bits of hair away from his bandages. Then he imagines someone taking the straight razor to the back of his neck, a part of the process he has always enjoyed in the past but which now fills him with anxiety.

He’ll be fine. Richie doesn’t mind him scruffy. Eddie would like to look his best, but Richie has seen him at his worst and apparently didn’t mind, so Eddie will just do the best that he can.

Down the hall he can hear Richie talking, pausing in regular intervals as though listening for a response. Eddie assumes he’s on the phone. He finishes with his grooming and takes his toiletry kit back to his room, and through the closed door he hears Richie say, “Like a shot of lime juice? Uh, okay?”

Eddie doesn’t know what to make of that, but he doesn’t feel right about waiting in his room and overhearing Richie’s conversation. He goes back out to the living room and resists the urge to pace. Just to burn through some of his nervous energy, now back in full force, he gets a dishtowel out of the kitchen and runs through some shoulder stretches. When he hears Richie’s door open, he throws the dishtowel across the room completely on some panicked instinct.

Richie doesn’t even come all the way down the hall into the living room, just vanishes into the bathroom. Distantly Eddie hears running water. Shamefaced, he gets up and slinks over to retrieve the dishtowel, and then drops it down the staircase in the general direction of the laundry room.

He can throw things now. He thinks that bodes well for his recovery: he’s regained some range of motion in his arms, and nothing in his chest pulls hard enough to make moving them impossible. The shoulder stretches are meant not just to build up his strength again but also to keep the forming scar tissue as supple as he can. As it is, Eddie still throws more from the elbow than the shoulder, but that’s probably exercise for his radial nerve, right?

Richie comes quick and heavy-footed out of the bathroom and allows his momentum to carry him into the living room. “Okay, so, in my defense, I packed to get murdered, not to—hey.” He stops.

It’s always impressive, when Richie goes still. In turn Eddie freezes at the top of the stairs, like he’s been caught doing something he shouldn’t.

Like Eddie, Richie is dressed basically the same as usual—tight-fitting black t-shirt and dark jeans. His leather jacket is in his hand, but hanging so low it threatens to drag on the ground, like Richie forgot about it entirely. And he’s looking at Eddie with an unfamiliar expression—his eyes very large and dark in his face, his jaw relaxed and not exactly openmouthed but his lips a little parted. He clearly cleaned up—shaved down his stubble a little and evened it out. His hair’s a little damp near the temples and towards the ends.

Eddie doesn’t know why he suddenly feels like he could fall down the stairs. Like he must either do that—topple over backwards and hope Richie can catch him in time—or walk over to him and shove his face into Richie’s wet hair, push his hands under his shirt, take deep warm breaths of him. But he can’t do either of those things—he feels oddly paralyzed right now.

They just stare at each other.

Then Richie’s grin cracks his face. “Eds, you’re _cute_.”

Oh Christ. “I am not,” Eddie replies immediately. He wants to shove his hands into his pockets, but he took enough business and management classes to know that’s a sign of insecurity, and he polices himself. “I didn’t even do anything different, this is just how—”

“Cute, cute, cute,” Richie singsongs, paying him no mind. He takes a step closer, and then another. Eddie really thinks he’s going to walk straight over to him and his shoudlers go sort of slack in anticipation, like he’s ready for Richie to hold him up. But instead he stays a few steps away and sort of orbits him, a barrier of neutral territory between them, his eyes _raking_ over Eddie.

Is this… is he checking him out? Is this being checked out? God, no wonder this has never happened to Eddie before, who the hell would have the audacity to do this in front of another person? Only Richie fucking Tozier.

Richie completes his three-quarter circle of Eddie and comes to rest by the half-wall next to the stairs. Casually he loops his hands around the banister spokes and leans against it.

Eddie swallows and says, “Oh my god, I’m going to go get a jacket.” It doesn’t come out as steady and sure as he wants it to, and the corner of Richie’s mouth drags his smirk a little wider. Eddie narrows his eyes at him. “I have to—” He gestures vaguely, uselessly, with his right hand.

A little shock goes through his arm, like he bumped his funnybone on something. His teeth click as he bites down against the pain.

Richie catches that too. Now he looks a little less self-satisfied and a little more concerned. But he doesn’t ask. “Have to…?” he prompts.

“Car,” Eddie says stupidly, and then shakes his head. “Ear—the. I’m going to have to take a Dramamine to be in the car without—”

Once he gets it Richie bobs his head in understanding, mouth opening and then closing as though to go through the motions of saying _yep_ without wasting the breath.

He shifts a little, even more self-conscious. “I might fall asleep in the car,” he admits.

Richie gives an easy shrug. “You always fall asleep.”

He scowls. “Not by choice.”

Another shrug. “It’s cute.”

Eddie resists the urge to grind his teeth. “It’s _not_ cute, because I’m a forty-year-old man, not an infant.”

Richie leans forward and rests his chin on the banister. His eyebrows lift gently. “Is this your way of saying you don’t like _cute_?”

That’s… not the point. He fights the instinct to hunch down, to make himself smaller. Instead he holds his back as straight as he can stand. “I have never liked—” he begins haughtily, and then realizes that’s a fucking lie and interrupts himself. “Well. Not on a date. Shut up.”

Sensing weakness, Richie slowly tilts his head to the side. The flat part of the banister presses into his cheek. “If you don’t like it, I can stop,” he says. “You know I don’t mean, like, baby deer cute, right?” Then his eyes flick to the side, considering. He misses the face that Eddie pulls in response to _baby deer_. “Okay, maybe I did when we were, like, ten, but trust me, I’m very aware that you’re a forty-year-old man who has been through puberty.”

Eddie is still holding the _baby deer_ face and when Richie sees it he laughs.

“Okay, okay, moratorium on _cute_ for the evening,” he says. Eddie flushes a little. “You look _handsome_. You look _gorgeous_. Do you have other suggestions you’d prefer?”

Oh god. _Handsome_ and _gorgeous_ are even worse. Eddie’s shoulders ratchet up when he hears them and he has to consciously relax them. Who the fuck says _moratorium_ in casual conversation? Richie fucking Tozier.

“Uh, fuck off?” he suggests, because Richie set him up and he can’t resist. It wins him a startled burst of laughter. He shifts, uncomfortable being scrutinized. “I don’t know, man, what do you want me to say?”

Richie’s eyes flick back towards the ceiling again as he considers. He keeps his tone light and matter-of-fact as he recites, “ _‘Yes, Richie, please, oh my god, oh my god, fuck_ —”

“Fuck _all the way off_ ,” Eddie says, finally incensed enough to turn and retreat down the hallway, his face and ears burning.

Richie’s laughter follows him, echoing off all the glass and flat surfaces in Ben’s weird modernist house.

In the guest bedroom, he stands with one hand over his mouth, staring at the spider plant like it can offer him sympathy. There’s a sort of pleased shiver in his chest, nevertheless.

With his white sweatshirt on, the lizards—probably the subtlest pattern of any of Richie’s shirts—look muted and almost sensible. In the kitchen Eddie takes a motion sickness pill and then shakes two doses of his painkillers into a snack-sized Ziploc bag. One is for his standard evening meds, and one is for if they run very long. He tucks the bag into his pocket rather than worry about bringing the bottle with him. It would rattle.

Phone in his other pocket, medicated and prepared, he returns to the living room. Richie is on the couch again, leather jacket on now and his legs crossed so his knee juts out and almost bumps against the coffee table. He’s on his phone as usual, and his free arm is spread over the back of the couch. He looks… very big. Long-limbed. Graceful isn’t the word, because he’s not moving. Eddie thinks of statues.

“Are you going to be warm enough?” he asks automatically, and then he wants to kick himself.

But Richie just looks amused. He raises his eyes and, instead of asking Eddie if he’s metamorphosing into a grandmother, says, “I didn’t bring anything else with me to Derry.” He shifts his shoulders a little, indicating the jacket. “Bev went out and bought me this because I kept shivering in your little icebox room.”

Eddie’s eyebrows go up in surprise. “Oh.”

He allows himself one more sweep of his eyes over Richie’s body—not that he’s going to get any more barometric information just from looking, but Richie ogled him in two-hundred-seventy degrees. This is just evening things up. And Richie’s mouth remains the same line of bland amusement. He doesn’t make fun of him for that either.

It was always good to make Richie laugh at a joke, to get him on Eddie’s side—he’s always been the funniest person that Eddie knows. But somehow in the intervening years he’s learned how to _withhold_ , something he definitely didn’t know how to do as a kid and had to blurt out every thought in his head, most often to his detriment. Instead he learned how to look at Eddie like he knows something Eddie doesn’t, and is laughing about it. Not in a mean way, just a sort of… _wicked_ way, almost.

 _Supervillain_ , Eddie reminds himself, and then sort of laughs at himself. It’s just funny to be having these thoughts about Richie of all people. He was, after all, the boy who wrestled him to the ground, pinned him, and then ripped up chunks of the lawn to sprinkle grass in his face while Eddie thrashed and squalled that he was going to kill him.

He almost asks Richie if he wants to borrow a hoodie or something to wear under his jacket, but all of his clothes would be too small for Richie. He supposes he could suggest something of Ben’s, but… The leather gives him the impression of armor, somehow. Armor, and then the perfunctory covering of the t-shirt, and under that he’s soft. Eddie still wants to push his hands under it.

Richie’s given him the opportunity when they kiss on the couch— _that very couch_ —but it feels weird to do it when Richie can’t reciprocate. Or—he could, but he doesn’t. Richie’s careful of Eddie’s punctured torso, never grabs him there but always at the hips or the legs or the arms, never lies on him but pulls Eddie on top of him or pushes him carefully up against the back of the couch.

“You ready to go?” Richie asks. His head is tilted slightly, giving Eddie a bit of a sidelong glance with his eyebrows lifted. The corner of his mouth hides something shy of a smirk, but more than a smile.

He knows Eddie’s looking at him and wanting.

“Do you remember the time you force-fed me coffee grounds?” Eddie asks.

It works as intended.

Richie groans and sits up straight, arms coming down to his sides, wince crumpling his face. “Yowza,” he says, pushing his glasses up. “You coulda just said you changed your mind, you don’t wanna go out.”

“Oh, shut up,” Eddie says, rolling his eyes.

The Taste-It Game was something that Bill originated with Georgie, when it became obvious that Georgie was developing a personality and independent thought and wanted to dedicate both to doing whatever it took to be allowed to play with Bill and Bill’s friends. It didn’t take off among the group, partly because Stan refused to play, but partly because Richie had no sense of proportionate response. Eddie would offer a waxy leaf plucked from a plant outside, a few pennies that he had in his pocket. In response, Richie pulled a whole handful of cold wet grounds out of the Denbroughs’ coffee maker and stuffed them in Eddie’s mouth.

“I’m just saying, I don’t know what you think you have to be nervous about, since you did that and I still want to go on a date with you.”

Richie looks physically pained, pulling at his own face like he can defend himself from the memory. “I forgot about that,” he says. “And—for the record—I did not force-feed you coffee grounds, because you spat them out and then tried to scrape them off the floor and force-feed _me_ coffee grounds.”

“And then Bill’s mom kicked us out,” Eddie remembers. “And Stan yelled at us for fucking up his afternoon.”

Slowly, sheepish, Richie brings his hands down. “So what you’re saying is, that’s the bar for the evening.”

Eddie tries to hold his straight face. “Yeah, that’s it. Just don’t feed me coffee grounds and we can count it a success.”

Richie stands up from the couch and stretches, folding his arms behind his head and leaning all the way back. Eddie’s gaze flicks to the hem of his shirt, the way it pulls up slightly behind the protective flap of the open leather jacket. It clings tight over the button on his jeans, and with the shadow Eddie can’t tell if the shirt even rides up enough to show him Richie’s skin. He didn’t know the little twist of anticipation in his chest was there until it curdles. He resists the urge to glower at Richie’s clothes and instead lets his gaze fall lower. His jeans are straight-legged, not tight the way that kids wear them these days, and either artfully faded across the thighs or (knowing Richie) are actually worn down from rubbing his hands on them.

Richie has nice thighs, Eddie thinks, and then whisks his eyes up again before he can have any traitorous thoughts about rubbing his own hands on them.

By now Richie has extended both arms out to the sides and is stretching that way. He doesn’t seem to have caught Eddie being briefly possessed by a thigh-obsessed demon. Then he yawns. “I mean, I thought the bar was ‘ _don’t put anything in my mouth,’_ but somehow yours is even lower.” He leers theatrically at him from across the living room. “We’ll skip the after-dinner espresso, I think I can manage that.”

“The rule is, _ask before you put anything in my mouth_ , dumbass,” Eddie says, and gets to watch Richie trip over the coffee table.

* * *

The thing about having Richie in a car, is that it reminds Eddie how much he likes to look at Richie in a car. Richie seems to make a show of how big he is as he slides into the driver’s seat, accompanied with a frankly unnecessary amount of shoulder adjusting. Eddie watches, trying to decide whether it’s on purpose, but Richie doesn’t look up to check for a reaction. The first thing he does is plug his phone into the aux cord and hand it to Eddie with great solemnity.

“A token of my esteem,” he says gravely.

Eddie blinks a little, turning the phone over in his hand. “So is the joke here that there are nude pictures on here, or…?”

Richie barks out a surprised laugh. Eddie feels the glow of having scored a point.

“That’s a new phone,” Richie says easily as he buckles his seatbelt and checks his mirrors, though he was the last person to drive this car. Eddie approves of this display of safety precautions and wonders if this is innate to him to or if he’s still performing. “Nudes weren’t in the cloud, so they didn’t transfer. Sorry to disappoint.”

Shocked from his peaceful admiration of Richie’s caution, Eddie stares at him. “I was kidding, you idiot! Do you actually—even if it’s not in the cloud, there are _hackers_ in the world. You’re a _celebrity_.”

His shoulders are starting to shake with suppressed laughter. Eddie sincerely hopes Richie’s just fucking with him. He puts the key in the ignition. “I’m really not.”

“Uh—yeah, you are.”

Richie has a Wikipedia page. His little thumbnail photo looks extremely confused. His bio says that his genres include “cringe comedy,” “blue comedy,” and “satire,” and that his subjects include “gender differences,” “human behavior,” and “social awkwardness.” Eddie went on a lot of spirals through Wikipedia recently, and he sort of hates Richie’s Wikipedia page. If he actually liked typing on his tiny phone keyboard, he might make an account and start making corrections. First of all, Richie’s birthplace is listed as _Los Angeles, California, U.S._

“Uh, not the kind that anyone gives a shit about,” Richie says in the exact same point-out-the-obvious tone Eddie used. “Anyway.” He reaches over and taps on the phone without taking it out of Eddie’s hands, entering his passcode and opening up the black and green Spotify app. “Pick the tunes, dude. Since you’re gonna zonk out on me anyway.”

“Tell me you don’t take nude pictures,” Eddie says.

“I cannot believe we are having this conversation,” he says. “Probably because Grindr has trained me to believe that men can only communicate through exchange of dick pics.”

“Richie.”

Richie is making the exasperated face that says that Eddie is being totally unreasonable, when in fact Eddie is being extremely reasonable about a very real security concern. “I do not take nudes,” he replies. “Not gonna say there are no pictures of my dick out there, but they aren’t associated with my face or name, and I haven’t sent any in—” He lifts his head a little to stare into the middle distance as he tries to remember _the last time he sent someone a picture of his dick_.

Eddie cannot decide if this is reassuring or just outrageous. He swallows. “So you said you didn’t date.” He assumed, more or less, that that meant that the extent of Richie’s relationship activity was casual sex out in Los Angeles or while on tour or something. “Did you have people you, uh.” He remembers the Ziploc of pills in his pocket and distracts himself by tucking it safely into the glove compartment. “Um, have an arrangement with, or…?”

He doesn’t look up at Richie, but the amusement is clear in his voice when he asks, “Are you asking me if I have friends with benefits I have to break things off with?”

“Sure,” Eddie says, trying to pretend like this is something he’s neither embarrassed nor jealous about. He leans back in his seat again and starts scrolling through Richie’s ridiculous Spotify playlists again. _Girlfriend in a Coma_ is still at the top of his recently-played list—Eddie opens that case he needs to throw down the Smiths as some kind of _ad hominem_ attack or something.

“Uh, no,” Richie says. “I haven’t _had an arrangement_ with anyone in like a good four years, and the last person I actually dated was a woman, so you’re about as in the clear as you can get.” He puts the car in reverse and props his elbow on the passenger seat, just above Eddie’s shoulder, and twists all the way around to back out of the driveway.

The moment that the car lurches into motion, a point of pressure forms midway between Eddie’s ears and his throat—an awareness that nausea _should_ be there but isn’t. He closes his eyes against the white text on the dark screen. Motion sickness meds are notoriously fast-acting, but if there’s one thing guaranteed to nauseate him, it’s reading in the car.

“A woman?” he repeats stupidly, eyes flying open. _You mean, like, to a woman?_

“Yeah, yeah, yuk it up,” Richie says.

Eddie does not say _Didn’t we just talk about Eva Green?_ But he also can’t come up with anything to say that isn’t _Didn’t we just talk about Eva Green?_ so he says nothing, and then panics a little about saying nothing and what if Richie takes that as silent disapproval?

Instead Richie fills the silence, as is typical. “But that was in, like, 2009 and she had to leave the state after, so don’t worry about that either.”

Eddie wants very strongly to face-plant into the dashboard under the weight of the knowledge that, the year after Eddie got married to a woman, Richie was apparently dating a woman he knew he wasn’t attracted to. But instead he manages, “Had to leave the state?”

Richie shakes his head. “She got a good job offer and I was a piece of shit, so she dumped my ass. But it’s funnier to say, _Ah, yes, the women who date me immediately find reasons to leave the state of California_. California’s one of the biggest states in the country, so it’s like, even moving to NorCal would be too close.”

Eddie is still fixed on the middle of his statement. “The _women_?”

Richie shakes his head. “In the act. Anyway, it’s been seven fucking years and Mom is still mad about that, so.” He shrugs. “Actually more angry about that than the cocaine, which I think should be much more pressing. Hey, if you could play some music to shut me the fuck up, that’d be great, please and thank you.”

“You have never shut up a day in your life,” Eddie reminds him, but he looks down at the screen instead.

The playlist _Girlfriend in a Coma_ is not full of the Smiths as he had expected. That’s the first track, naturally, but it’s followed by Buddy Holly, Weezer, Don McLean… Eddie squints at the composite album art up in the corner, because one of the four images is an illustration of a frowning face made out of bacon and eggs staring up at him from a frying pan. Something itches in the back of his head. The Buddy Holly song is “You’re So Square.”

Wait a fucking minute.

“Am _I_ the girlfriend in a coma?” Eddie demands, incredulous.

Richie scrunches his face up so hard that his eyes are only barely open, the minimum fucking requirement for operating a motor vehicle. “Oh, fucking fuck, please not that one.”

_“Richard.”_

“The playlist titles are for internal use only,” Richie says. “Please do not distribute to outside stakeholders. Please do not criticize new management before it has taken effect.”

Eddie sees that the tracklist includes “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” by the Beach Boys and wants to shake him.

“What the _fuck_ , Richie?” he asks, hitting shuffle. He looks down at the screen, satisfied to see that he does not know either the band The Strokes or this song “Juicebox,” but that it made it onto a playlist that—between the things Eddie dimly remembers hearing Richie babble about and his reaction now—is almost definitely about him.

“So in my defense,” Richie says, “that’s supposed to be a clever reference title because you were in a coma, _not_ because I think of you as my girlfriend, which I don’t.”

“I should fucking hope not,” Eddie says. The bassline and drumline sound like something out of an action movie. It’s not as illuminating as he hoped it would be. “I seriously did wake up because I heard you singing ‘American Pie’ to me.”

“I would not come back to life for my singing,” Richie says immediately. “It’d be like, a little angel would tell you, _turn around and listen to that boy’s song!_ And then the angel would be like, _I am so sorry, there has been a clerical error, please come into the light_.” He pitches his voice up for the angel.

Eddie blinks twice. “It’s not your song, it’s Don McLean’s song, and why would an angel call you a boy if you’re forty?”

Richie waves a hand and gives a short shake of his head. “It’s a movie, it’d upset you, don’t worry about it.”

Eddie frowns deeper, incredulous. “What movie?”

“It’s a straight man’s lukewarm take on the AIDS crisis. Trust me.”

He grimaces hard. “Yeah, I’ll skip that one.”

Richie is frowning out the windshield. “Lukewarm,” he says slowly. “Lukecool.” Another pause and then, “ _Cool Hand Luke_.”

“ _Cool Hand Luke_ is not about the AIDS crisis,” Eddie says.

“Different movie.”

Eddie only barely remembers what happens in _Cool Hand Luke_ , but he’s pretty sure that the nickname is a poker reference. He dwells a little bit on why Richie’s so much better at poker than him and why (besides the insane possessive competitiveness) it bothers him so much, and then he realizes that he has “The Gambler” stuck in his head so he gives in and queues it up.

He’s always liked cars. Even before he turned sixteen—and getting his license was a real pain in the ass, he can remember now, because it wasn’t like his mother was going to give him lessons on her old Pacer. She never even wanted to take the training wheels off his bicycle—Zack Denbrough did that for him when he and Bill were nine, and Bill never even _had_ training wheels.

Now he remembers lessons sneakily taken with the other Losers in high school. _You’re too jumpy_ , Mike told him, and then took him out to the farm to rev up an ancient truck that, it seemed, Mike and his father had to raise from the dead every spring before they could drive it. The deafening roar of that engine, its sudden spurts and heavy _chunk!_ sounds, combined with Will Hanlon’s laughter and Mike’s whooping eventually numbed Eddie. Probably the best preparation he could have asked for for New York traffic sounds.

He can remember how at the end of his driving test, the instructor turned to him with a faintly concerned expression and asked, _You all right, son?_ And Eddie replied that he was fine, thank you, and he had his photo taken and paid for his new license with his own money, and then he drove Bill back home to thank Mrs. Denbrough for letting him borrow their car. By that point Zack Denbrough had passed on and Sharon had entered a sort of apathetic state about her son as well as her possessions, but Eddie still had to thank her.

Something about the hum of machinery relaxes him. As a child he was fascinated by them—he started building a knockoff Soap Box racer in the garage before his mother found out and made him disassemble it. But he remembers how he felt the first time he sat behind a wheel by himself—no Mike, no Bill, no mother. The way that the tarmac, shoddy from Maine winters, suddenly seemed to roar up at him. How he felt thrilled and paralyzed in equal measure.

He feels a little of that now, looking at the glow of the sun on the backs of Richie’s hands. He errs on the side of ten and two instead of nine and three, but he also tends to drape his wrist lazily over the wheel and drum at it with his fingers. If his hands aren’t moving he’s rolling his head on his shoulders, sitting up straighter or slouching back in his heat. At this hour of the day the light is bright golden yellow, and Richie growls under his breath and pushes his glasses further up his nose and sits up straighter to get the sun out of his eyes.

Summer’s dying by now—it’s almost October—but looking at that light makes Eddie feel like it ought to be July. Like they ought to be stomping through heat-dried grass. It swished and itched around his bare knees, and he remembers sitting on the dirt floor of the clubhouse, illuminated only by Stan’s Boy Scouts lantern, picking scabs off his mosquito bites. The way they wandered aimlessly around town just to walk, and Bill started to burn across the bridge of his nose, his cheeks, his forehead. Eddie freckled before his skin gave in and tanned—god, they didn’t know anything about cancer back in those days—and he remembers the smell he always caught on himself when he tromped home at the end of the day. More pleasant than old sweat, different somehow from that usual unwashed preadolescent stink.

There was something to it, then. Being children and free-range and touched by a star.

The car slows at a light and Eddie lifts his head, blinking in some confusion at the shopping center he can suddenly see in the distance. An unfamiliar song is playing. The phone is still balanced on his lap. He didn’t even realize he was drifting, he went under so fast.

“Still with me?” Richie asks. Now that his hair is dry it curls at the ends. Eddie wants to tuck his face into the crook of his neck and breathe in, see what sense memories lie hidden on Richie’s skin.

But his heart is in his mouth, so he just nods and shakes his head to clear it.

* * *

The Dramamine nap leaves him feeling weirdly alert, like he’s drunk a quart of coffee and then enjoyed a mild electric shock. It’s completely the wrong vibe for wandering into this beige department store, with its displays of luggage and handbags and large bargain bins of prepackaged men’s undershirts. And the entire store—despite fairly wide avenues for walking—seems too small for Richie.

Richie is close to Eddie’s shoulder and leaning over him, sort of, his mouth covered as though to deliver his David Attenborough impression directly into Eddie’s ear. “ _Eduardus spaghetto_ seeks to hunt in a new and mysterious territory,” he says, his hushed whisper somehow too loud. “Who can say whether he will find familiar resources here or, driven by the destruction of his native habitat, return to scavenging?”

Eddie blinks. “It’s not really scavenging if you literally give me the shirt off your back.”

Richie abandons his impression and says, “I feel like there’s a joke to be made about parasites there, but I don’t think nature shows are like, _Have we considered that the host species is just really fucking stupid_?”

Eddie’s mouth pops open in indignation. “I am _not_ a parasite,” he says. “ _You_ are a six-foot doormat.”

“If I were a six-foot doormat, you couldn’t climb over,” Richie says. “Are we shopping in the men’s section or the children’s section today?”

What the hell is Eddie supposed to say to the short jokes? _I’m short, but you’re_ too _tall and_ too _broad and_ too _manly_? Fuck.

“Well, we’re looking for shirts like yours, and you never stopped shopping in the children’s section,” he says.

Richie brightens. “And imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. I gotcha, Eds.”

He does something rather odd, then—he puts an arm around Eddie’s shoulders for only a moment, pats him on the bicep with his other hand, and then releases him and walks away. It’s not exactly a hug, but it’s not _not_ a hug either. Eddie watches him walk towards the back of the store—past the endless racks of clothing and into the home goods—and then vanishing behind display shelves. When he does not reappear, Eddie rolls his eyes and starts looking for shirts.

He doesn’t know much about fashion. He always left that up to Myra. She was so relieved to get a job at the boutique, but her joy quickly changed to frustration when she realized that customer service is always the same, no matter where you work. He very rarely asked her for advice about what to wear to important meetings or the odd interview, but if she knew he had one coming up, she laid suits out for him without having to ask. She paired ties with suits and left the shoe polish out for him on the chair because she knew he liked to do that himself. And eventually, Eddie stopped telling her when he had bigger events coming up. He might not know anything about clothing, but he knew that he wanted to pick it out for himself.

This is to say that Eddie doesn’t know much about brands or brand values. He can recognize some designer names—he always thought _Marsh_ sounded familiar even before he remembered Bev, and he wondered if it was an old brand that his mother might have purchased. He tends to assume that if something is expensive, it must be good. And he approves of places that sell designer labels at lower prices, because he enjoys feeling like he’s getting away with something. Money is something he admires, but also wants to defeat in combat.

Which—well. That’s a fairly common mix of feelings, for him. Look at Richie.

The work of shuffling through the racks is only nominally physical. Mostly it’s fidgety, walking to the large section instead of the mediums and rifling through hangers one by one. If Eddie can be quick enough, maybe he’ll find something before he gets winded from standing. He won’t go into the dressing room—they’re invariably filthy, and since he’s looking to buy deliberately oversized shirts there’s no point.

There is no organization of these supposedly discount-priced clothes. Maybe the shopper is supposed to feel some long-lost hunter-gatherer instinct when sifting through them. Eddie, fresh from a David Attenborough impression, feels more primitive than is warranted for shopping in a department store.

When Richie approaches, Eddie catches him in his peripheral vision and knows it’s him just from the way he moves, the shift of his shoulders. He doesn’t look up, a little embarrassed by how attuned his invisible radar is to Richie, and instead considers the pros and cons of a salmon pink shirt. It would be the brightest thing that Eddie owns. On the other hand, he’s forty years old and he just came out. He feels like there’s something kind of pathetic about having to announce his sexuality before he can buy and wear a pink shirt, and honestly he’s not that invested in it anyway. He pushes it out of sight just as Richie steps in close to his side, all shadow and leather scent.

“Do you need this?” Richie asks.

Eddie looks up and finds that Richie is cradling in his arms a large ceramic jar. He has it turned so that the writing on the front is pointing at Eddie: _BONE APPÉTIT_. He blinks, surprised, and looks up at Richie. Richie’s face gives away nothing.

“Is that… is that, like, a blowjob joke, or…?” Do they sell novelty sex canisters here? What blowjob-related equipment would you store in a canister?

It turns out that at some point in the last thirty years, Richie has learned to control his laughter in public. His shoulders start shaking, he twists his mouth up in an effort to keep it all inside, and he holds the jar close to his chest so there’s no risk of him dropping it.

“It’s for pet food.” The words come out choppy and staccato as he tries to keep a straight face. “But I like where your head’s at.”

Eddie’s first instinct is to shove him in the shoulder, but he doesn’t want to be responsible if Richie drops and breaks the BONE APPÉTIT canister. “Put that back,” he instructs him, though he doesn’t really mind.

Richie wanders away, head up and steps slow and apparently aimless in a way that makes him look much younger. Eddie watches him go and then returns his attention to the rack.

He’s looking for button-down shirts, larger than he would normally wear. Probably long-sleeved, because they’re about to go into fall properly and Eddie is so cold all of the time. Something between the formality of a dress shirt and the informality of one of Bill’s flannels. And they don’t have to be extra-large the way that Richie’s are. He doesn’t want to look like he’s wearing Richie’s clothes when he’s not—he’s not stealing Richie’s shirts for the _style_ , after all. And would Richie even fit in a standard-sized shirt, or would he have to shop at a big and tall store? The strain that the t-shirt is putting up with across his chest suggests no. Are big and tall stores an actual thing? He’s sure he’s heard about them, but he doesn’t think he’s ever actually seen one in real life.

Focus.

There are plenty of long-sleeved button-down shirts in generic plaid patterns—things Bill would wear, Eddie thinks automatically, and then is surprised by how quickly the association popped into his head. He checks the label on one of the collars and is immediately outaged—why would someone advertising their work as designer fashion make the same shirt that Bill Denbrough has been wearing since 1989? How can people be allowed to get away with this?

Wait a minute. Eddie knows an actual fashion designer now. As in, has her number in his phone _right_ now. He doesn’t want to interrupt whatever she and Ben are up to, but maybe if the next time they’re talking he asked her a few questions, she would have some advice for him? Maybe if he sends her a picture she’ll tell him if he’s totally off base?

“Do you need this?” Richie asks from directly behind him. Eddie startles, jumps, and turns to glare at him.

He has a three-foot-tall wooden giraffe. Its delicate carved little feet are in his hands, and he holds it as though he’s wielding a chair in a bar fight.

“I don’t think that would cover my nipples,” Eddie replies seriously.

Richie’s mouth wobbles as he fights for his straight face. “That is something I know about you. One nipple is down here and the other is—” He waves a hand over the giraffe’s head.

“No, you don’t,” Eddie says, ignoring this funhouse mirror world in which his chest is over three feet long. “I told you not to look at me. You saw nothing.”

“Okay, but like, I have seen your nipples,” Richie says. “Like, in our lives, I have seen your nipples.”

“Why the fuck do you remember my teenage nipples?”

“Probably your extensive chest tattoos,” Richie replies. “I am glad you got them removed. The _fuck the police_ one was funny, but probably not a good investment in the long run.”

Eddie laughs first at the joke and then has a thought so dark he can’t hold himself together and has to hang onto the rack of shirts, shaking as he tries not to make a scene.

Richie smiles reflexively at him, watching him lose it. “What?”

Oh god. Well, if Eddie’s not allowed to joke about it, then nobody is. He swallows and says, as quietly as he can manage, “Pennywise tattoo removal services.”

He gets to watch in real time as Richie processes, understands, and reacts. His hands come up to either side of his head, still holding the giraffe. His eyes are wide. “Oh my god,” he says, staring at Eddie.

Eddie puts his hand to his forehead in guilt. “I know.”

“Oh my _god_.” The fingers of his free hand splay wide and then make a fist again; Richie shakes the giraffe. “All of you gave me so much shit for—”

“—for everything about you, yes, we know—”

“What if that’s why growing up everyone was like _you know tattoos are permanent_?”

“The fuck are you talking about, you chickened out of getting your tattoo—”

“Yeah, but can you imagine getting that removed?”

“Your cancer ribbon tattoo?” he asks. “Your tattoo you hypothetically got to honor your father surviving cancer? You would get that removed?”

“Depends on Went’s good behavior,” Richie says.

“He better behave for your sake, you don’t want what I have.”

 _“Jesus,”_ Richie hisses, leaning forward now, his eyes very wet with unshed tears. Considering his reaction earlier today when they talked about Eddie’s impalement, this is a marked improvement. He holds the giraffe up like a shield. “I’m buying this.”

“Do not buy the giraffe. Go put the giraffe away.”

“Nuh-uh, it’s too late, he’s my giraffe. Instead of taking you on some carnival date and winning you a stuffed animal—” He lowers his voice a little and looks over his shoulder as he says it, but the smile doesn’t fade from his face.

Eddie tries to focus on that instead of the paranoid part of the gesture, instead scoffing at Richie’s presumption. “I was in gym class with you our whole lives—you couldn’t win jack shit at a carnival.”

“—instead of _you_ taking me on a carnival date and winning me a stuffed animal, I’m gonna buy my own wooden giraffe,” Richie revises.

“Oh my god.”

“It’s no big deal, it’s like twenty bucks.” He straightens and rotates the giraffe so he can look into its little pointed face. “Besides, what if Goldie gets lonely?” He turns the giraffe back as though Eddie is meant to make eye contact with it.

Eddie looks at its painted eyes. It takes him a moment to recall Ben’s ridiculous golden turtle statue. He imagines Ben coming home to his modernist architectural marvel and finding a pretentious animal statue _that he didn’t put there_. And one that only cost twenty dollars.

“Okay, but what if we bought the statue just to fuck with Ben?” Eddie murmurs.

Richie seems to grow taller with happiness, spine straightening and hands tightening on the wooden giraffe. “There you go, Eds,” he says. “Now you’re thinking.” He waggles his eyebrows and sways into Eddie’s space so that their shoulders brush for a moment—carefully, not a check that would hurt but a slide of the leather jacket across the fabric of the sweatshirt, and then away. Then Richie retreats, giraffe in arms.

* * *

For a store that sells wooden giraffes, canisters that say BONE APPÉTIT, and small throw pillows shaped like a firehouse and its matching fire truck—Richie actually does go into the children’s section for those—the clothes available are pretty boring. They emerge with a three-foot-tall wooden giraffe, whom Richie has already and uncreatively named Woodie, but no new shirts. Honestly, Eddie probably should have considered the futility of being goal-oriented when he decided to go shopping with Richie fucking Tozier.

But he doesn’t know why he suddenly cares that the clothes are boring. He never thought about clothes—which are just there to cover his body, to protect him from the elements—in that way before. It disquiets him all the way back to the car. He frowns at the bright sun as Richie delights in his purchase.

“What’s the deal?” Richie asks.

Eddie almost blurts out _How the fuck do I dress myself?_ But then a sort of predictive Richie in his brain seizes on all the snide comments and dirty jokes that would set real Richie up for.

“I don’t know what clothes I like,” he says.

Standing on the other side of the car, Richie just raises his eyebrows at him, the corners of his eyes somehow smug. Richie _really_ likes that Eddie likes wearing his shirts.

“For _me_ ,” he protests, and then: “Shut up.”

He opens the passenger door and buckles up while Richie lovingly places Woodie the giraffe on his side in the backseat. Eddie is still considering matters when Richie opens the driver’s side door and collapses into the seat. The Impreza is small enough that his sudden weight rocks the car for a moment, and Eddie’s hand automatically reaches for the security bar over the door before his shoulder catches up with him and he hisses.

Richie freezes. “You okay?”

“I’m a _moron_ ,” Eddie gripes, lowering his arm and rolling the shoulder as gently as he can. The controlled stretch is a little bit better. He’s in charge of that pain, anyway.

Richie snorts. “Yeah, you’re fine.”

Eddie rolls his eyes again. “ _Obviously_ I’m fine.”

“Oh, _obviously_ ,” Richie repeats, putting a British accent on the word for no discernible reason. Then he puckers his lips and says in a broad casual Voice, “Just _too fine_.” He closes his door and wrestles into his seatbelt while Eddie fights the urge to blot at his own flushed face. “So where are we going? Dinner? Or do you want to try again?”

The part of Eddie that gets a vicious satisfaction from crossing things off of lists says that going out to buy shirts and coming back with a wooden giraffe is a failure. The Eddie that has greater joys in life than making and completing lists is not impressed.

He doesn’t answer, instead hedging, “So,” and falling silent, staring at the lock on the glove compartment as he tries to organize his thoughts.

“So,” Richie agrees. He doesn’t put the key in the ignition—can’t set a course until Eddie makes up his mind—but he also doesn’t try to hurry him along or anything. He just waits in the driver’s seat, big and more patient than Eddie would have expected out of him.

Eddie uses that weird hunter-gatherer instinct still hanging out in the back of his head to chase down the strange feeling in his chest so he can tag it for research. The process takes a few moments.

“You know how I just… torpedoed my whole adult life?”

His chest hurts a little bit, but it’s manageable—a deep bruise-like pain instead of a shooting pain, or something that hurts when he breathes. He knows that Richie knows that Eddie has thrown his previous lifestyle in the garbage, but it’s the easiest way he can think of to convey the scope of his current thoughts.

Richie’s eyebrows shoot up and he blinks rapidly. “And now you have buyer’s remorse?”

Eddie immediately makes the connection between Woodie the giraffe in the backseat and Richie beside him. If Eddie’s bought anything, it’s Richie himself. “Fuck no,” he says quickly. He wouldn’t go back to Myra if he could stop himself. “I just—feel like I’ve been going, going, going for the last—my whole life, you know?”

“Yes,” Richie says. “On that note, if you could handle caffeine right now we’d be improvising a home test for ADHD.”

Eddie gives a little shake of his head to wave that away. “It’s really weird to be… sitting around. Lounging around. Not doing anything—I mean,” he says quickly, “I know I’m healing, but not—that doesn’t feel like something _I’m_ doing, you know?” He has never been his body and now he really doesn’t know how to be, now that literally dying has made it necessary.

“I can recommend about eighty very stupid phone games,” Richie says dryly, his voice oddly flat. Eddie glances at him sidelong, looking at his lidded eyes. He’s not looking at Eddie now, but instead out the windshield at the pet store further down the strip. “You’re bored.”

“No,” Eddie says, and means it. He waits for Richie to look around at him and then holds up both hands, clutching some kind of imaginary globe between them. “No, I _should_ be bored, but I’m either too stoned, or—” He swallows and then gestures at Richie himself. “—distracted to be bored. But I’m not… It’s not _productive_ , and that’s a weird feeling.”

And he’s kind of tired of his body getting in his own way. It’s nice not to have to go to work, not to have to worry about trucking out to a lawyer’s office, to be able to put off the things that he dreads doing. But there are things he _wants_ to do, he’s pretty sure, and he can’t do those either. He feels… still.

“So there’s a part of my brain that’s like, _You’ve been dressing like a slob for two weeks_ —”

Richie laughs. “Tell me how you really feel.”

Unable to really throw up his hands properly, Eddie drops them palms-upright onto his thighs for a moment to illustrate his point. “Your clothes _fit you_ ,” he says, because while he knows that Richie’s shirts are ridiculous and childish and actually not that bad, pretty unobjectionable once Eddie climbs down out of his office’s dress code, he still doesn’t know anything about style. He’s just reasonably sure that wearing clothes that fit and changing out of pajamas at some point during the day are basic steps towards presentability. He tugs at the hem of the lizard shirt where it pokes out from under his sweatshirt. “That’s not the point.”

“Sure, go back to telling me how distracting I am,” Richie says, a faintly pleased smile curling at the corners of his mouth.

“You’re the Exhibit A of that point,” Eddie says. He shakes his head. “I packed all of these clothes for Derry. Like, I packed a sport coat for Derry. I don’t know what the fuck I was thinking.”

“Aw, fuck, now I’m gonna have Jimmy Buffett stuck in my head for the rest of the night.” Richie grimaces hard.

This actually stops Eddie in his tracks. _“Why?”_

Richie waves a hand. “There’s a Marty Robbins song—I’ll play it for you. Don’t worry about it.”

Eddie holds up both hands, trying to hold the whole concept in his hands. “I thought I packed for anything.”

“All dressed up for the dance,” Richie agrees sagely.

Slowly Eddie blinks at him, making a show of his exasperation so that Richie can grin back at him. “Turns out I did not pack for recovering from a traumatic chest injury.”

“You didn’t think that was a real risk, when you were in New York packing your eighteen suitcases?” Richie asks, sarcastic tilt returning to his eyelids.

“Amazingly, no.”

They’re quiet for a moment.

“I mean, in retrospect, the risk was pretty high,” Richie says.

“That’s not how risks work,” Eddie says. “You don’t come back and say ‘well, this thing happened, so the statistical likelihood was actually one-hundred percent.’”

“That’s not what I’m saying—”

“People do that all the time, trying to quantify that shit in hindsight, and now nobody knows what the fuck a statistic is, I’m going to _kill Malcolm Gladwell_ , it’s called the sharpshooter fallacy—”

Richie’s laughter comes from deep in his chest. “That’s not what I’m saying, I’m saying you came back to the murder town, the likelihood of being murdered was very high.”

“Not so much, since Its prey of choice was minors, and I’m forty,” Eddie says. “More likely that I’d get murdered by, like…”

Richie blinks slowly. “Me or Bev?” he suggests.

Eddie winces. “Okay, maybe I failed a spot check there.” It’s a joke, but it falls a little flat. He leans back in the passenger seat. “Anyway, I kind of hate that guy.”

Instead of asking _Henry Bowers?_ or _Bev’s dad?_ Richie incredulously guesses, “Jimmy Buffett?”

Eddie snorts. “No, like—office worker Eddie. Who packed a sport coat to go back to the murder town and… can’t wear a pink shirt because what if someone _saw him in it_.” He rolls his eyes.

“You definitely owned a pink shirt when we were kids,” Richie says.

Eddie tucks his elbows closer to his chest. “It was a polo. It had a train on it.” He sighs. “If you knew what I spent on polos now, you would be laughing too hard to drive this car.”

“Do they have trains on them?”

“They do not.”

“It’s a polo. How expensive can they be?”

“I know.”

He blinks twice. “Did you, like, have to pay the silkworks a salary or some shit?”

Eddie smiles a little at the idea. “Yeah. That’s what I do in my big office back in New York. I manage a bunch of silkworms.”

“That’s cute,” Richie says almost absently, and then adds, “Sorry, forgot.”

Eddie blinks in surprise before he remembers the agreed moratorium on the word _cute_. “Silkworms are allowed to be cute,” he says. He doesn’t have really strong opinions about bugs as long as they aren’t in his home, at which point his brain fills with murderous rage. Silkworms have jobs, which in Eddie’s head makes them more palatable.

They’re quiet for a moment. Eddie contemplates this alternate reality in which he and Bev work together. He manages the silkworms and Bev turns the silk into fabric. Stan keeps the books.

“I don’t know what to tell you, man,” Richie says. He’s not privy to this extended family. “I pay people to dress me if I actually have to be, like, _seen_ in public.”

Honestly Eddie suspected something like that, based on the photos of Richie up on a stage in a t-shirt and blazer.

“You did not pay someone to buy you this,” he says with great certainty, plucking at the lizard shirt again.

Richie smiles. “That’s not a _seen-in-public_ shirt.”

Which is for the best, because Eddie has taken several naps in it, and he’s pretty sure that by strict function it might have been demoted to loungewear at this point. He lets his head loll against the headrest and watches the automatic door on the pet store slide open again, watches the people go in and out.

Beside him Richie asks, “You hungry?”

“I honestly have no idea,” Eddie says. The Dramamine means that he won’t get any input from his stomach for hours yet. “You’re gonna have to decide when we go eat, I won’t be able to tell when it’s a real mealtime.”

“So to revisit my question,” Richie says, “where are we going from here?”

Eddie turns to look at him and remembers that this is supposed to be a date, not another opportunity for him to have an existential crisis all over Richie. He might be in a constant state of trying to redefine his place in the universe, but he knows where he’ll be at the end of the night: clambering up the stairs to Ben’s house with Richie beside him, probably being snarky about it.

He sighs and bites the bullet. “Where do you buy your _not-seen-in-public_ clothes?”

Richie grins.

* * *

It’s not anywhere particularly special. They go to Macy’s. There are tile pathways around the carpeted display areas, and that makes Eddie feel a little bit like he has a road map for his explorations. The décor is gray and navy instead of beige, and Eddie decides he prefers that—gray and navy aren’t exciting, but he likes them better than beige. That’s something he knows about himself.

He comes to a halt in front of a display.

The men’s line for Rogan&Marsh is just ROGAN. Eddie looks at it for long moments, suspicious, wondering whether Bev’s piece of shit husband actually has anything to do with the label or whether it’s all her work, and whether the people who buy her clothes (like Bill’s wife, apparently) are supporting her or just aiding the man.

He swallows. “So Bev’s husband,” he begins delicately. He hasn’t gotten all of the details.

Richie’s jaw is tight. “Uh-huh,” he says, neither giving anything nor dissuading Eddie from speaking.

“Bev is—right to hide, isn’t she?” It comes out less a question and more a resignation. “Did you guys talk about—”

Richie takes an audible breath and Eddie quiets immediately. He, too, is staring at the big ROGAN sign. Eddie admires his profile. His sideburns are impossibly sharp and square and far less ridiculous than they were when he showed up at the Jade of the Orient in Derry. Eddie remembers, some unknown number of beers in, staring at him over Stan’s shoulder and being both fascinated and offended in equal measure. A little pulse starts in Richie’s jaw.

“She’s right,” he says tightly, and that’s all.

So that’s that. Eddie turns and walks on, not wanting anything associated with the man. Richie follows him practically on his heels. Eddie can almost feel the heat coming off of him.

There is a sea of clothing. Eddie knows he’s looking for shirts, but Macy’s is divided by labels and not by garment types. He looks at his options and then considers that he technically has an extra pair of hands, and Richie probably won’t get tired walking around as fast as he will. Richie stopped when he stopped, so Eddie turns to him and finds him standing with his hands in his pockets again. The slight hunch has returned to his shoulders, but it doesn’t make him any smaller.

“Okay, so you know how you were being a feral cat bringing me dead things?” he asks.

Richie arches his brows and says in mock indignation, “Woodie is alive and well, thank you very much.”

“Better not be,” Eddie replies.

Richie flattens his mouth and waggles his eyebrows a little. Eddie has to look away from him, pretending to inspect more displays.

“Just show me some fucking shirts, man,” he says. An ache is starting in his lower back, probably because he’s been on his feet longer today than he has since he left the hospital. “No skulls. No Hawaiian shirts. And nothing you think Bill would wear.”

“Eddie.” Richie’s voice has a sort of barely-contained excitement. Eddie remembers it—it was how he would sound when they were kids and he finally pushed Eddie past the boundaries of good judgment and riled him up enough to do something stupid. “Are you letting me pick out clothes for you?”

“No,” Eddie says quickly. “You’re bringing me _options_.” Not only is the distinction very important, he doesn’t have time to reject joke offerings of, like, crocheted bikini tops or something.

But if Eddie doesn’t want boring clothes—well, he suspects that he’s about to discover what the shirt equivalent of a three-foot-tall wooden giraffe is.

He chooses a rack at random and starts shuffling through it, just to get started. He can feel Richie still watching him, standing just behind him. Instead of asking what he’s waiting for, Eddie ignores him in favor of inspecting a robin’s-egg blue shirt. Then he hears Richie walk away, and the click of metal hangers.

“What is something Bill would wear?” Richie asks from several yards away, too loud.

“Plaid and flannel,” Eddie replies. This may be a gross oversimplification of Bill’s character, but the sweeping generalization is relevant to Eddie’s personal tastes.

“Does he?” Eddie looks over his shoulder to find Richie staring up towards the ceiling, apparently playing back the tapes. “Huh.” He shrugs, eyebrows lifting, and then returns his attention to the clothes.

Eventually Eddie loses track of where Richie’s gotten to—he’s out of sight, anyway. He glances around to check that the coast is clear, and then he leans against one of the mirrored pillars. He doubts that these installments are loadbearing. He just pushes his shoulder up against it and takes a few deep breaths, wishing for a chair or something.

This is how a salesperson finds him.

“Can I help you, sir?” he asks. He’s a little shorter than Eddie, black, with a shaved head and round gold-rimmed glasses.

Eddie inhales again and hears the breath whistle in his nostrils. “I’m all right,” he says. And then, so that the man knows that he isn’t having some kind of attack in the middle of the salesfloor, “I’m recovering from surgery. I just get a little tired.”

“Ah,” the man says. “Do you need to take a moment and sit?”

Despite the thoughts he was just having, as soon as someone else suggests it to him it sounds completely unnecessary.

“No, no, I’m okay,” Eddie says.

“I can bring a stool from the dressing room,” the man says.

Faintly irritated but not enough to make this guy’s life harder, Eddie stands up straight. He checks, but he didn’t leave any marks on the mirror. “No, I’m all right,” he insists. “Just—looking for shirts.”

“Sure,” the salesman says. “You’re in the right place.”

It’s not funny, but Eddie huffs a little laugh out of his nose just to smooth the situation.

“Do you have anything in mind that you’re looking for?” the salesman asks. “Anything you’re looking to pair a shirt with?”

He wants to shrug, but his body physically will not allow it. Instead he tips his head to the side, indicating, _eh_. “Just something new and interesting,” he says. To shake this guy off, he adds, “Really, I am okay.”

Which is right when Richie reappears, saying, “Okay, hear me out,” before he’s even come to a complete stop.

A pulse of nerves goes through Eddie’s stomach. It’s unnecessary—he’s just out in public with Richie. People shop for clothes all the time. Presumably, straight men sometimes consult their friends for advice, especially when they are recovering from surgery. Even if this Macy’s salesman happens to be homophobic, there’s no reason for him to assume anything about Eddie and Richie’s relationship.

But still he thinks, _Is Richie about to get recognized? How close is he going to stand to me? How’s he going to play this?_ He turns to look.

Richie seems to have tried to turn himself into a display rack. He has handfuls of hangers and then has lined a number of them up on his forearms, and he extends his arms carefully as though afraid to drop them. The hangers don’t hook neatly around them, because Richie’s arms are thicker than they have any right to be, but he balances their little metal tips on the leather of his jacket with complete disregard for possible damage to the material.

Right off the bat, Eddie sees that there is not a single bland boring neutral in the bunch. And there are ludicrous patterns—a blue and orange check that Eddie hates on sight, interlocking red and blue triangles, pink and black checks, a whirling white and blue paisley, alternating green and orange diamonds, something bright blue with red curls that look suspiciously like fish. There’s more.

“Oh my god, Richie, I said no plaid,” Eddie says immediately.

Richie pauses and looks down at his haul, his brow furrowed. “I didn’t get plaid,” he says, visibly confused.

Eddie’s love for him hits him like a physical weight. He glances back at the salesman.

The salesman looks at him diplomatically. “I can take anything you decide against,” he says.

“Give him the pink thing,” Eddie tells Richie, almost adding _I’m gay but not that gay_. He’s not _twenty_. No one his age should be wearing the pink and black, he’s pretty sure.

“Uh—” Richie raises both arms, looking like a man trying to balance a flock of pigeons or something. “My hands are kind of occupied.”

Eddie rolls his eyes and approaches him. Richie stretches out both arms for accessibility, so Eddie flicks through some of the assembled shirts and plucks out the obvious rejects—the pink and black, a shirt with a print of photorealistic butterflies, and two separate shirts with patterns of roses. Eddie barely has to turn before the salesman is already there waiting to accept them. Eddie feels a pang for what they’re about to do to the careful displays and the organization of this area of the store.

“My name’s Gus,” the salesman says. “If you can’t find me, you can also return clothes outside the dressing rooms.”

“Thank you,” Eddie says, and Gus leaves. Eddie looks back at Richie. “Are you about to drop all of those?”

“Nah,” Richie says. “Depends on how mean you are to me.”

Of course. Because Richie is also stronger than he looks. Eddie sighs through his nose and continues inspecting the selections.

One is a pink shirt with a pattern of burgundy flowers. “Oh my god, how gay do you think I am?” Eddie murmurs, removing it from the options and setting it on one of the racks.

“Hopefully, pretty gay,” Richie replies in the same undertone.

Eddie also rejects the orange and blue checks, a white one with small blue flowers, another white one with a small purple and black pattern that makes him dizzy just to look at, and a bright blue one with tiny red flowers so closely packed that the whole shirt looks purple.

“Haha, no,” Eddie says to this last, setting it aside.

“Oh, my arms,” Richie groans. “Is gravity increasing? I feel like gravity is increasing.”

“If you collapse under a sea of shirts, I’m going to leave you there,” Eddie tells him. Then: “This is a Stan shirt.” It has robins on it.

“Should I buy it for him?” Richie asks, turning his head to look.

A spike of irritation goes through him and Eddie blinks momentarily in surprise. Is he mad that Richie’s buying things for their friends while he’s on a date (technically!) with him? Is he jealous? He’s never been jealous before.

He’s also never had anyone he wanted to keep as much as he wants Richie.

He sets the robins shirt aside—a different rack than the rejected shirts—and takes a close-up photo of the pattern with his phone. This he sends to the group chat and adds, _Stan, Richie wants to know if you want this shirt_. It takes him far too long to hunt and pick for the letters. His fingers are clumsy and he has to use the predictive text feature to correct his typos. He sends it and is tucking his phone back in his pocket when he hears the buzzing from somewhere under Richie’s wall of shirts that means the message has landed in the chat.

No point in being jealous about a shirt for Stan if he wasn’t over the wooden giraffe ostensibly for Ben.

“This one looks like a swimming pool,” he says, removing a blue-green check. The next shirt is just a very bright red, no pattern. He frowns at it.

“So what I’m hearing is that my career as a personal shopper is over before it started,” Richie drawls. “Guess I’ll have to go to my back-up plan.”

“Which is?”

“Standup comedy.”

“Unrealistic.” He watches Richie smile and then tugs at the red shirt. “Why this one?”

“I’m trying to get bulls to attack you in the street,” Richie replies immediately.

“Ah, yes. The wild bull population of upstate New York.”

“Well, my back-up back-up plan is to become a matador, so really I’m just using you to solicit work.”

“I should have guessed.” He inspects the cuffs. They are white on the inside with a small red pattern.

It’s not boring. It’s brighter than anything he owns, neither a neutral nor dark. He says nothing about it but leaves it hanging from Richie’s hand instead of prying the hanger out of his fingers, and that’s enough tacit approval.

“Absolutely not,” he says to a purple shirt that would be similarly unobjectionable, except that it’s shiny. “You cannot dress me like the Incredible Hulk.”

“The Incredible Hulk famously wears no shirt,” Richie points out.

“This shirt looks like it’s warning onlookers that I’m suffering from gamma radiation.” There’s another shirt with roses on it. This one is navy with red, white, and pink roses, but at least they’re not on a checked background. “What is it with you and roses?”

If Richie said, _I don’t know, there are just a lot of shirts with roses, I guess they’re fashionable_ , Eddie would have believed him.

Instead Richie says, “Oh, so you don’t like it when I bring you roses, I get it.”

Eddie stalls out right there, his hand on the sleeve of the rose shirt. There are some bright blue ones up by the points of the collar too.

“What?” Richie asks, and then, misunderstanding why Eddie froze, “Nobody’s here.”

“That’s—” Not why he’s currently struggling to move on and keep being a dick about shirts. He feels very odd all of a sudden, like the correct response would be to blush. Slowly he looks up to make eye contact with Richie. “Did you bring me roses?”

Richie snorts. “Yeah, I’m a romantic,” he says, the sarcasm heavy in his voice.

Eddie stares at him. He feels like he can hear deeper than the words somehow. _I have a royal flush, Eds, you’d better fold now._ And Richie was telling the truth then, and only trying to make Eddie believe he was lying.

“You did,” Eddie says slowly, certain of it. Richie is taking him on a date and brought him roses. Here they are.

Richie does not blush, but he averts his gaze and to look determinedly over Eddie’s head. His shoulders shift a little bit and all the shirts remaining on his arms squeak as the rotating parts of the hangers shift.

Well, Eddie’s gonna have to buy this damn shirt. Like it’s a souvenir of his first date with Richie or something. God damn it. He checks the price tag. “It’s eighty fucking dollars, Richie,” he says, outraged.

“Well, nobody says you have to buy it,” Richie says, tone going narrow and snippy.

“Well, I’m gonna,” Eddie growls back at him. “Here—” He starts unhooking hangers from their careful balance on Richie’s long arms and redistributes them so that he can place the rose shirt and the bright red one in his hand. “Hold onto those.”

Once he goes through Richie’s haul—he’s neither interested in the koi fish nor the triangles—he continues his search among the floor displays. There’s a navy shirt with an interesting diamond leaf pattern that he thinks is acceptable—busier than what he’d wear for work, but not out of the question. Still holding the Eddie-approved shirts, Richie goes back to trying to sneak up behind him and startle him. He keeps appearing over his shoulder holding a surprising number of shirts with daisy patterns on them. “No.” Eddie finds a shirt that’s a medium-gray, but has a subtle paisley pattern on it that makes the whole thing look like stirred mercury. He puts that in Richie’s hand as well.

To a blue shirt artfully weathered to make it look like denim, he says, “Look, Ben would wear this.” What is the point of taking a formal shirt and making it look informal? Why is fashion arbitrary and weird?

When he turns to Richie for confirmation, Richie has a hanger with a black dress shirt on it slung over his shoulder. In his free hand he holds a blue shirt with an irregular pattern of blue and white. Eddie is momentarily intrigued, before he checks the tag and sees it’s labeled _painted leopard-print shirt_.

“What the fuck kind of leopards do they have in New York?” he asks, shaking his head.

Richie looks contemplative. “Rhapsody in Blue,” he says idly. He does that sometimes, floating whole concepts instead of responding to direct questions. Eddie doesn’t mind playing word association games with Richie, if they’re just shooting the shit.

He gestures to the hanger on his shoulder. “What’s that?”

“That’s mine,” Richie replies unhelpfully. He nods to something behind Eddie. “That one looks like _Yellow Submarine_.”

It’s a white and blue paisley pattern. Eddie turns to look at it and confirms that, yes, it does look like Beatles album art.

He finds a second navy shirt with white leaves, this one less geometric, and another faintly textured one in a deep but vivid blue-green. It doesn’t remind him of a swimming pool. Then he lines up all of his potential candidates on Richie’s outstretched arms again and makes him hold them while he takes pictures to send to Bev, accompanied by a single question mark.

He doesn’t necessarily expect her to respond right now—Stan still hasn’t—but Bev texts back almost immediately. _Richie said you were going shopping! You would look good in any of those_

Eddie counts his purchases, wincing at the price tags but figuring that it’ll be worth it to have a good week’s worth of shirts. He needs a buffer on doing laundry. He checks the fabric tags inside and sees with satisfaction that nothing is fancy enough to need dry cleaning either, which is good, because it’s still possible he’ll get some kind of wound fluid on them.

Stan hasn’t responded by the time they take the rejected shirts to the dressing room, where a saleswoman accepts them and hangs them on a large rack.

“I’m getting the bird shirt,” Richie says. “If he doesn’t like it, he can throw it at me.”

“Do you even know what size he wears?”

“He’s like—your size before you went through the dryer.”

“Excuse me? What does that even mean?” Eddie demands, and storms away to pay for his shirts before Richie can even respond.

As he waits to hand the cashier his new debit card, he can feel himself fighting a grin. He wouldn’t bicker with Richie if he didn’t like it. And Richie brought him roses. While he stands there waiting for the cashier to remove the magnetic security tags, he painstakingly types out _What is fashion_ and sends it to Bev. And then, because he’s not sure he’s actually interested in being fashionable, _What are clothes?_

 _We just don’t know,_ Bev replies.

Richie appears with a bag, apparently having visited another check-out counter while Eddie was waiting for the cashier. He lets it hang and bump against his knee, doing that thing where he looks like Gumby again. His other hand is back in his jacket pocket.

“So what’s the verdict?” he asks. “Does our quest continue, or are you good?”

How many shirts does Richie think Eddie needs? His feet are starting to ache, and his back is not thrilled by how long he’s been standing.

“How far away’s the Thai place?” he asks.

“Not far,” Richie says. “Like half an hour.”

He’ll probably have to take his pain medication as soon as they sit down at the table, but he can last that long. “Let’s do that,” he says, knowing he’s likely to fall asleep in the car again.

The sun is starting to set as they step out into the parking lot, the light having turned from gold to a sort of denim blue. With a rustle Richie starts fumbling with his bag, dragging out the black shirt and frowning.

Eddie assumes he’s going for his receipt. “What?”

“Can you hold this?” Richie asks. He looks for a nod or something, because it’s an actual question—can Eddie’s noodle arms handle the weight of one more shirt on top of the bag of clothes he already has to support with both hands?

“Uh,” Eddie says.

“Never mind,” Richie says. “Hang on.”

He comes to a stop by the curb and sets his bag down between his feet. Eddie stands there, confused, while Richie rolls his shoulders as he shrugs out of his leather jacket and drops it in the bag. The black t-shirt, which already has a tension strain between his pecs, stretches further. Richie isn’t muscular per se, but his chest is large and faintly defined compared to his ribs and stomach.

He doesn’t notice Eddie staring. Instead he starts fussing with the black shirt. He finds the tag on the sleeve and then brings it up to his mouth and—to Eddie’s horror—starts gnawing through the plastic tag.

“Oh my god,” Eddie groans. “Oh my god, what are you doing? Your dad’s a dentist.”

There’s a little click as Richie bites through it and removes the plastic end from his mouth. He drops that in the bag too. At least Eddie doesn’t have to worry about him littering or, worse, swallowing it. “Look, the biters have to be good for something,” he says.

Eddie sort of understands what Richie’s doing before he fully processes it. He starts undoing the buttons on the black dress shirt. Eddie waits for him to put it on right there in the street—weird, but not absurd.

What he does not expect is for Richie to shrug slightly, his gaze still on the concrete, and then reach behind his head and drag his t-shirt off by the collar. There’s a slight bulge to his bicep as he bends his arm back, and Eddie sucks in a breath through his nose. It’s not graceful. The shirt gets stuck halfway, Richie’s navel and the defined line of dark hair leading down into his jeans exposed before Eddie’s goggling eyes. Richie is sort of lightly hairy all over, it turns out, but that’s about as clear as an arrow pointing down. _I’m with stupid_. Richie shifts his weight and brings up one knee to drop the new shirt on his thigh so he can use both hands to pull the t-shirt free. When his head pops free he tips it back like he’s standing up out of the ocean. His glasses hang from the end of his nose as though for dear life.

It would serve him right if he dropped them and cracked them on the pavement, Eddie thinks, suddenly feeling vindictive.

Richie’s naked torso is not exactly new to Eddie, but this is the first time he’s seen him actually take a shirt off to reveal it. He’s very pale and somehow the contrast between that and the coarse dark hair strikes Eddie like a blow to the head. He’s broad and soft and there’s a sort of squaring around his sternum and ribs where his pectoral muscles make a cursory showing, and his nipples are somehow paler than Eddie expected them to be; and Eddie’s throat is dry and he wants to touch him and they’re standing outside of a Macy’s.

“What the fuck, Richie?” Eddie squeaks. It’s the only thing he thinks he can get out of his mouth that isn’t _I want to lick you_.

Richie drops his t-shirt on top of the bag like it’s garbage and whips the dress shirt around his shoulders easily, sliding one arm into it before he even bothers to look up at Eddie. Immediately he grins and Eddie snaps his jaw shut in the moment he realizes that his mouth was open. Richie shrugs one broad shoulder as he puts his arm through the other sleeve and then begins buttoning the shirt, starting at the collar. Eddie doesn’t know whether to stare determinedly at his face—it feels a bit late for that—or to look away from him entirely.

Oh, fuck it, he’s forty, not fifteen. He’s just going to fucking stare.

“Told you I didn’t have anything,” Richie says.

“You can wear a t-shirt under a dress shirt!”

“I can,” Richie agrees. “I’m not.”

“Well!” Eddie says, full of sound and fury. “Well, I can see that!”

If Richie’s going to tuck the shirt into his pants, Eddie’s going to walk ahead of him and wait by the car, instead of watching the indecent display. There have to be boundaries somewhere.

But Richie rapidly buttons the shirt and then picks up his jacket and the bag with the robins shirt in it once again. He pushes his glasses up his nose and starts walking towards the car like nothing happened at all. Casually he asks, “Hey, remember how you called me a tease?”

“Oh, fuck you,” Eddie says.

“I’m just saying, it’s your move,” Richie says.

“Carry my fucking bag, jackass,” Eddie says, and lobs it at Richie. They’re only walking to the car, but he feels like he’s made his point well enough.

Richie catches it, laughing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> AHAHA now I just have to get them to dinner! (God I miss dining out.)
> 
> Thanks as always to [qianwanshi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/qianwanshi/pseuds/qianwanshi) for beta reading and for helping advise me on how to make Eddie even thirstier.
> 
> [Fanart by @HonkyCat5 on Twitter!](https://twitter.com/HonkyCat5/status/1288599277883752451)


	20. I'm Calling It

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Eddie and Richie's first date, part two--explorations in sensory input. A remedial course in hedonism.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey sorry it's been a month since I posted, someone actually commented asking if I planned to continue this and assured me it was fine if I don't and it was _so sweet_ I love you guys. Y'all want 51 pages of relationship nonsense? It's technically over twice as long as my target length for a chapter, but in my head this chapter is all one arc, so you get _one super-long date night!_
> 
> Content warnings: The big one is, Eddie has a nightmare with some eroticized asphyxiation/breathplay imagery. If this will be upsetting to you, skip the whole scene that starts "He has stress dreams" and go to the next section break. This is inspired mostly by my playing the game [Your Body, An Altar](https://theivorytowercrumbles.itch.io/your-body-an-altar) from the itch.io bundle this summer, and has _nothing to do with James Ransone's performance in **Kent Park**_ , are we clear on that? Because Eddie is a character and not any of the many actors who have played him. Also I do not anticipate writing Richie and Eddie exploring breathplay kink in this fic, so I'm gonna put that right up here in the header.  
> Other content warnings: unwoke white people discussing Thai cuisine, racism, and microaggressions; baby corn; _I will not have anyone be involuntarily outed in this fic_ but Eddie's a little nervous about the possibility; the characters' opinions on soup do not reflect the author's; Eddie doesn't know how dating customs work for a same-sex couple; Partner asked me the big question in this chapter and I don't know or care where he got it, I'm stealing it; reference to small animal death in _Of Mice and Men_ ; blunt and unsympathetic description and discussion of eating meat and animals for meat; making the sculptures kiss; Eddie still has a busted tooth; this chapter is technically explicit.

In the car, Eddie and his Dramamine lethargy fight off a rising tide of panicky thoughts. The Dramamine attempts to contribute by putting him to sleep in the half-hour between Macy’s and the restaurant. The pseudo-jaunty album Richie put on does nothing to help his case. Eddie, who knows how awful thirty-minute naps are for sleep satisfaction, fights it off by cataloguing what he thinks of as necessary accomplishments.

The first is the sheer exertion of this evening. They went to two stores. He stood basically the whole time. Now he’s tired, but he has enough energy to go to a third location, where he will be sitting and have the opportunity to refuel. The flats of his feet are a little sore, but in a way where—when he stretches his legs into the footwell—he feels like he’s achieved something. This has to bode well for his recovery, right? Even if all he can manage tomorrow is his half-hour walk, he wouldn’t have been able to do this straight out of the hospital. He’s improving.

Second: He’s on his way to try Thai food for the first time. He has never really sampled cuisine from different cultures. Part of this is because he never dined out, because it was far healthier to eat the things made at home, where his mother and then Myra could make reasonable choices about butter and salt and the number of vegetables he needed to consume. Part of it is because he always had a sense that he had a delicate stomach, and cultures with unfamiliar spices or extremes of flavor might make him sick. Now that he’s thinking about it, that was both boring of him and possibly a little bit racist. But he thinks he’s ready.

Eating Chinese food at the Jade of the Orient was fun—before Stan staggered in fresh from a suicide attempt and an escape from a psychiatric ward, and before the fortune cookies started twitching. It was nice to sit around a table with friends and talk and eat and drink, and somewhere between the conversation and the alcohol Eddie stopped worrying about cross-contamination in fryers and the Benadryl he took in the car and the dangers of MSG migraines. He just let himself enjoy being the kind of person who got dinner with his friend and talked with them.

It was very like the conversation he had with Ben and Bev back at the hotel, before they ordered the ridiculous loaded French fries. He has never enjoyed food. Ever since he got out of the hospital, everything has tasted fantastic. Every meal has been an opportunity to hang out with his friends, or with the Toziers, or with just Richie himself. Eddie is no longer a lonely little man who eats salads and dry baked chicken and whatever his wife sets on his plate. He spent all of his life eating to live, and then he died. Which means that eating healthy didn’t really do much for him, in the long run. It didn’t affect the fact that he died at forty.

“What’s in Thai food?” Eddie asks.

Richie jumps a little—his shoulders jerk, like maybe he thought Eddie was asleep. The sun is only just going down outside the car, and while the lighting has gone faintly blue it’s still clear enough to see in here. But Eddie is sitting slumped low in his chair—too tired to hold himself up properly—and facing the windshield, in case of sudden motion sickness.

“Uh—lot of stuff,” Richie says. “Curry, rice noodles, regular rice, lots of sauces, ton of vegetables, those weird baby corns—you’re gonna dig it.”

Eddie frowns at this assessment of his culinary palate. “Do you think I’m into weird baby corn?”

“You know when you eat, like, Chinese food, beef and broccoli, and the sauce gets into the broc?” Richie asks. “And it’s like—fuck the Velveeta, broccoli is the ideal vehicle for this sauce? And you can, like, use it as a sponge to apply more sauce to your rice?”

Eddie blinks at this very specific description of the appeal of broccoli. Honestly, he’s a little happy to hear that there are vegetables that Richie enjoys eating.

“I don’t know that I’ve ever had beef and broccoli,” he admits. “I basically never ate Chinese food before—before Mike’s dinner reservation.”

And then he was leery about eating a lot of the meat, because there was no way of measuring the quality of the cuts, how much gristle was left on the strips that were pan-fried and served in the mysterious sauces, and Eddie has always hated the feeling of biting down on _fat_ , of something that won’t give under his teeth. His mother used to heat canned soups for him—chicken noodle, usually, which Eddie now hates with a passion—and he remembers how he hated biting down on the cubes of chicken, but how his mother cried when he wouldn’t clean his plate.

And honestly, Eddie was sick after the Jade of the Orient, but that mostly had to do with existential fear and binge drinking, if he’s being honest with himself.

Richie turns his head only slightly to glance at him, but if there’s pity in there, Eddie can’t see it. “Oh, dude,” he says. “Lemongrass. Galangal. Fucking, like, fish paste, dude. You’re gonna eat fish paste and be happy about it. Gonna be like me the first time I had pickled cabbage, like, _what the fuck, why am I enjoying this_? It’s good. A billion Thai people can’t be wrong.”

Fish paste does not sound appealing. Eddie doesn’t even know what galangal is.

“What’s galangal?”

Richie’s expression goes pinched as he thinks about it. He finally answers, “It tastes like if oranges grew on pine trees.”

Somehow that does and does not answer the question at the same time. Eddie blinks a little.

Third: Eddie is on a date. With a man. He hasn’t been on a date in a good nine years or so, and honestly he never really mastered the art. There’s skill in measuring out how much you show of yourself in spoons, trying never to be too much or too off-putting or too pathetic; skill in being honest but at the same time making yourself _likeable_.

Eddie doesn’t think he’s ever been likeable. In his infrequent interviews over the last decades—when he thought about making his way up the corporate ladder, which he could have done except he decided later that it was better to stay where he was comfortable, where he and Myra wouldn’t have to move—sometimes people asked him what his greatest weakness was. Eddie knew enough not to give a bullshit answer—a strength _disguised_ as a weakness. Instead he always said, _I’m an acquired taste_. And what he meant by that was—he was there to work. He wasn’t interested in socializing beyond the standard _good morning_ when he came into the office, the nods at the water cooler (so much healthier for you than coffee), the _good night_ on his way out, the after-hours required mixers. And if he heard conversations—like about the Academy Awards—that he thought he might want to participate in, he never said anything and kept all his preparation to himself. He hid behind his professionalism.

There’s no hiding from Richie.

In a way Eddie sort of resents him for it. He feels like he’s sitting back at the poker table. Richie has raised the stakes and Eddie has to match him, but he’s not sure to what end.

That’s the thing about a date. Admittedly dating Richie is a little bit like dating with training wheels, because Richie already likes him—Richie has said _I love you_ twice like an assurance—and Eddie knows better than to try for politeness, for reservation. He shouldn’t be worrying about how to be _likeable_ , because Richie likes it when Eddie’s mean to him and likes it when they’re bickering and likes when Eddie gives back as good as he gets and makes him laugh.

The thing is, Eddie isn’t really sure how to give back as good as he gets in this case.

Because Richie is seducing him. Eddie is being seduced. The suggestiveness, the long looks, whatever the fuck that little display with the new shirt was—Richie’s angling for something, and Eddie doesn’t completely know what that is. He’s made his interest clear, sure, but also his limitations, so the only thing he can think of is that Richie’s having fun teasing him, and…

Well, first of all, Eddie’s not sure that he can do that in public. Richie’s a celebrity. A child in a Chinese restaurant in Maine addressed him by name and quoted his work at him. There’s no reason to expect that a Thai restaurant in New York state will be any different, closer as it is in proximity to New York City, where you expect to see famous people. Eddie’s out, but Richie’s not, and Eddie likes having Richie to himself, but he’s not going to demand that Richie torpedo his career for him.

Any more than he already has, anyway, with his mentions of cancelled tours and managers considering terminating his contract. But Richie insists that that’s his choice, his decision to stay with Eddie during his recovery instead of getting back to his life.

And—Eddie isn’t… (the thought of the word makes him a little uncomfortable) _flirtatious_. Richie is, sort of, but it’s always a joke. Eddie doesn’t know how to joke like that. His dim imitations of bravery have to be driven by emotional extremes.

He’s not really looking for an emotional extreme in a Thai restaurant. He sort of feels like he’s reaching the end of his limitations by having three accomplishments for the day.

But then Richie’s there on the other side of the car, wearing a shirt so new it still has the finish from the store on it and a sort of wonky curl to the collar on one side, chattering away.

And Eddie’s wearing the lizard shirt and a hoodie and sneakers Richie bought for him.

“I don’t know if there are a billion Thai people in the world, I don’t know if it’s as big as India, but there’s gotta be people of Thai descent outside of Thailand itself, right? Like, the Thai diaspora. Like, round to a billion and leave it at that. One thing.” He holds up a finger, pointing in a tangent off of the steering wheel. “Usually a lot of Asian staff at these places, but not always Thai. A Vietnamese lady had to break it to me back in L.A.”

More than a little horrified, Eddie stares at him. “Did you—did you just ask her if she was from Thailand?” This is the United States of America. You can’t just assume that every non-white person you see is an immigrant. You can’t ask people _where are you from, really?_ Eddie has seen _several_ of his coworkers get reprimanded by HR for such things.

“No, before you eat, there’s like, a Thai equivalent to _bon appétit_ —bone appétit,” he interrupts himself, grinning. Eddie doesn’t bother rolling his eyes, just smiles back at him. Richie’s watching the road anyway. “And I don’t know what that is, but we were at a work lunch and one of the writers decided to show off, and she was like, ‘I’m not Thai. I’m Vietnamese.’” He holds up both hands, his thumbs still hooked around the steering wheel. “And I’m not totally up to date on the diplomatic relations between Thailand and Vietnam, but like… it was awkward.”

Eddie continues to stare at him. “So what is the takeaway from that story?”

“Hm?”

“What is the takeaway? What is the lesson learned there? Don’t say _bon appétit_ in Thai to Vietnamese people? Don’t try to speak a language _I do not know_ to the waitstaff at this restaurant? Don’t be fucking racist? What?”

“ _Don’t be fucking racist_ is always a pretty good one,” Richie says, his tone contemplative. “There are, like, _big_ racist things and _little_ racist things, and I can spot most of the big ones, but the little ones, sometimes they go under my radar.”

“Because you’re a white man living in Los Angeles?” Eddie suggests.

Richie grimaces. “Yeah, I don’t know shit that I didn’t learn from _Stand-up for Diversity_ on NBC.” He shrugs.

Eddie thinks, quietly, of the faint disappointment in Mike’s voice when they were last on the phone discussing Richie’s work. How weakly Eddie blurted out _He doesn’t mean it_ , and how inadequate it sounded against Mike’s profound silence.

He has a sense that it’s acceptable, on dates, to ask about the other person’s work, but Eddie doesn’t want to talk about his and he strongly suspects that Richie is avoiding his real life while he’s here in New York with him. He doesn’t know what to say of any substance, and he wouldn’t mind if all evening was just him and Richie shooting the shit, nothing too heavy, it’s just…

Richie said that he doesn’t date, and then he asked Eddie on a date; and then he said _your move_ , and Eddie doesn’t know what his move is. And for much of his life, Eddie’s move has been to passively keep doing the same thing that he was always doing. To be grandfathered into life states rather than actually achieve them through his own actions.

But Richie’s effect on him is the same that it’s always been, in that he sort-of wants to show off, wants to impress him, wants to get him laughing.

He _knows_ Richie, though. And Richie—Richie knows all the most terrifying things about him. And still wants to go on a date—Eddie makes him _nervous_ , he says. And Richie is still the kid who, on a visit to Mike’s farm, grabbed Eddie by the ears and held his face in front of a cow. And it licked him. A cow’s tongue is rough like a cat’s. Eddie remembers feeling lightly sandpapered.

How stupid to be nervous over Richie, when he decided actual decades ago that he’d like to spend most of his time in Richie’s company.

“Are you okay?” he asks. It’s mostly reflexive. Probably he’s just projecting.

Richie glances at him. As his head turns his sharp profile—nose, jaw—softens, and then he looks back at the road and grins. “Oh, I’m great, baby,” he says, as Eddie flushes. “I’m fucking peachy.”

* * *

When he sees it, Eddie’s a little surprised that Ben sometimes drives hours here to eat _soup_. It’s a small and angular building, and the parking lot is uncomfortably situated up against the side, all of its spaces at a diagonal. Richie grimaces as he puts his elbow on Eddie’s seat and parks almost exactly in the middle—not where Eddie would have chosen, but if Eddie passenger-seat drives every time he’s in a car with Richie he’ll develop an ulcer.

Then Richie engages the parking break and turns to look at him. His expression is bright. “How’d I do?”

“Huh?” Eddie manages, somewhat stunned by proximity and the sunniness of Richie’s face as he asks for approval.

Richie smiles a little wider and cuts the engine.

When they get out of the car Eddie realizes that Richie’s choice of parking space had to do with the proximity to the ramp up to the front door. There’s a series of three stairs, but sometimes going up and down stairs feels like Eddie’s lugging a ton of bricks with him. As it is Eddie gets out on the ramp side and ascends with plausible deniability, trying to decide whether or not he’s going to tell Richie that he noticed what he did here. Richie, for his part, steps easily up the little stairs and then holds the door open for Eddie. A bell dings over their heads.

Eddie’s stomach turns over. Is Richie holding the door open because Eddie’s injured? Or because he’s shorter than him? Or some misapplied sense of chivalry? Are _gender roles_ happening to him right now? He doesn’t know how he feels about Richie opening doors for him.

He knots his hand around the Ziploc of painkillers in his pocket and steps through the doorway.

A very pretty Asian woman with feathered eyeliner says, “Hello.”

“Hi,” Eddie says. He feels Richie step close behind him and the door dings shut again. “Two, please.”

She reaches over and picks up two menus from the host station. “Dining or the bar?”

Just the thought of trying to hold himself upright on a barstool makes Eddie tired right now. “Oh, dining.”

Does she think that this is a date? Does she _know_ that this is a date?

It doesn’t matter, he reminds himself. This is her job. He strongly doubts that she cares.

“Right this way.” She leads them across the little dining room—the dining area all seems to be one room—to a booth upholstered in maroon vinyl. Eddie slides into the nearest side and Richie slides across from him, looking big and awkward as he scoots into the middle of the bench. The hostess graciously pretends not to notice. “Someone will be right with you to get you water and take your drink orders.”

“Thanks,” Richie says.

She leaves. Their corner of the dining area is relatively isolated—Eddie sees some people at tables under the far windows, but they’re mostly left by themselves. Eddie knows how booths create the illusion of privacy, but between the empty chairs all around them and the instrumental music from the speakers muffling other people’s chitchat, he sort of feels like he and Richie are an island. He glances at Richie to see if he’s thinking the same thing, but Richie has picked up one of the menus and flipped it open. Reflexively Eddie grabs for the other one and opens it, but then turns to assessing the restaurant.

It’s a very sensible setup: four columns of tables, with booths on the outside under the windows and tables on the inside under the dividing wall down the center of the room. The dividing wall is paneled in dark wood, and atop it is a line of elephant statues. They’re organized by height, the tallest ones in the center and getting smaller toward either end. None of them seem to match—bright gold, dark gray, yellow, flower-painted. At the far end of the dining room is a narrow bar done in neon lights. Blackboards hang on the walls behind it, but because the writing is in cursive Eddie can’t read them at this distance. He guesses that they’re specials.

When Eddie thinks of _dates_ he tends to think of romcom representation. It’s a “nice” restaurant, with dim lighting but pale paint in the background and elaborate molding visible where the ceiling meets the walls. The tables are small so that you can see as much of the lead actress’s black dress as possible. Sometimes there are candles. Those are the momentous dates—the ones where you see either how lovely the heroine looks after her makeover or that the lead actor can take a social engagement seriously and look nice in a suit. The rest tend to be in diners, or walking out of movie theaters and discussing what they just saw, so the lighting is worse and people are dressed casually.

So Eddie’s current surroundings and outfit choice don’t really spell out that this is a significant date. It feels significant, though, despite the neon lighting, the mismatched elephants, and the red and black enamel on the table. Richie’s shirt has the wonky collar, but it’s black. Eddie resists the urge to glance down and inspect the lizard shirt and his hoodie to see how they measure up.

“So,” Richie says. Eddie turns his head to see that Richie has glanced up from his menu. There’s a sort of deliberate casualness to his eyelids that immediately makes Eddie wary. Richie points up at the ceiling. “Music like this.”

He furrows his brow, paying attention properly for the first time. It sounds odd now that Eddie thinks about it. The recording, that is, not the music itself. Some kind of percussion, some kind of pipe, but there’s a lot of feedback.

“Thai music,” he guesses, wanting to clarify.

Richie shakes his head. “Nah, just—music on a pentatonic scale.”

Eddie blinks at him, nonplussed.

“So most of the music you here is on a scale with seven notes—you know, Julie Andrews out in the hills teaching the little Austrian kids the joy of life,” Richie says, glossing over not only entire schools of music theory but also an entire Broadway show in one fell swoop. “But when you play on a pentatonic scale—you skip two of the notes on the scale, you have five notes that are basically always going to sound good together. As long as you play one of those, it’s impossible to hit a wrong note.”

Eddie frowns, listening harder. He guesses that there are only five notes in this scale? Maybe?

“Can you actually hear that or are you making shit up?” he asks. He knows that basically all of the Losers are artists, except for him and Stan. Though Ben makes skyscrapers and presumably there’s physics involved in that, so Ben gets a pass.

“It’s a real thing,” Richie says, though that doesn’t answer his question. “Pretty common in a lot of eastern music.” He hums through his nose a series of ascending notes, loud enough to be heard across the table.

Eddie blinks at him. “That was six.”

“Yes, the last one was the first one again,” Richie says, gazing blankly at Eddie like he should know this.

They stare at each other for long moments, each waiting for something. Eddie doesn’t know what Richie’s looking for here.

But Richie brightens without further input and says, “But it’s like—the musical equivalent of the pyramids. A fuckton of cultures all came up with this at the same time and were like, _wouldn’t it be great to be able to make music in such a way that you literally could not fuck up?_ ”

“How is that like the pyramids?”

Richie waves a hand like his reference to the pyramids—which _he_ brought up—is immaterial. “Basically happened all over the world, fuckton of idiots would rather think that it’s alien influence than disparate groups of non-white people going, _when we do this, the rocks stay stacked_.” He shrugs. “Except in Japan. Japan has a pentatonic scale, but they drop different notes. I can’t sing that one, I only learned the one.”

The part of Eddie that has heard Richie singing in the car only when he thinks Eddie is asleep is somewhat surprised at this sudden display. Another part of him thinks that singing in a restaurant is a violation of accepted table manners, so of course Richie is doing it.

“Why’s Japan different?” he asks.

Richie spreads one hand wide, smiling. “No idea. Apparently Japanese music breaks a ton of otherwise accepted musical theory rules. It’s, like, its own thing.” His upraised hand falls to the table and reaches for the upturned water glasses, running his thumb across the base almost absently. “Bunch of video games use it, though. Not sure if that’s because Japan has the big video game companies or just because.” He shrugs.

Eddie blinks at him and feels himself smiling in response. “Did you take a class, or?”

He has vague memories of a grade school daily ritual that involved posing trivia questions to the rest of the class, and how Stan and Richie came to blows—actual, had-to-be-separated-by-the-teacher blows—over what color blood was when it was in the body. Richie insisted it was blue and only became red when exposed to oxygen. Stan insisted that Richie didn’t know what the _frick_ he was talking about.

“I took, like, the most basic music theory in college,” Richie says. “Professor obviously did not want to be there. Spent a lot of time watching recordings of black gospel choirs and then got mad at all the white theater kids going _uhhhh_ in her class. Then I was very politely asked to leave.”

Eddie frowns. “The school?”

“The college,” Richie replies, and gives a sort of seated half-bow. _Ta-da_.

Eddie has no idea what to say to this, but he is fortunately spared by a waitress appearing with a pitcher of ice water. As she turns over their empty glasses—Richie yanks his hand away from his like it’s suddenly hot—she welcomes them to the restaurant and asks if it’s the first time they’ve visited. Privately Eddie always hates it when restaurants ask him that—the dine-in experience cannot be made so new and unexpected that he needs a tutorial before ordering. The last time he was truly surprised was the conference in Pittsburgh where his sandwich came with both a fried egg and French fries on it. Then she smiles and asks if they’d like anything else to drink.

Eddie should say no, should stick with water because it’s healthy.

“I’ll have a Sprite, please,” he says.

“Is Sierra Mist okay?”

Well, he’s never going to have to explain this to LeBron James. “Sure,” he says.

Richie orders a Thai iced tea. The waitress leaves the beer and wine menus on their table and leaves to get the drinks. Eddie squints down at the cocktail menu on the back of the laminated page, wondering if everybody has a beer and wine menu these days.

“What’s a Thai iced tea?” It sounds like an Irish goodbye or a Tokyo sayonara.

“Condensed milk,” Richie says. A small white can of Carnation brand condensed milk pops into Eddie’s brain. He stares at him incredulously. Richie corrects himself. “No, I mean it has condensed milk in it, I’m not drinking straight condensed milk, I’m not a serial killer.”

Laughter bypasses Eddie’s face and chest entirely. His abdomen spasms in something like stifled giggles. “Oh yeah?” he asks, his voice very steady. He takes his Ziploc of meds out of his pocket and starts picking out one dose, confident that Richie has a vein of material in the serial-killing condensed-milk Venn diagram to distract him while he takes his painkillers. “Serial killers drink condensed milk?”

“I feel like it’s a fingers-thumbs situation,” Richie says. “Like, I feel like it makes sense that there are some serial killers in the world who do not drink condensed milk.” Neither of them mentions that, according to the state of Maine, they actually had several very close calls with a serial killer, or at least someone trying very hard to be a spree killer. Nobody ever interrogated Henry Bowers about his dairy habits. “But if I was at someone’s house and they just broke out a can of condensed milk and—” He mimes using a can opener, levering the top of the can off, and then drinking straight from the ragged metal edge. “—I’d be like—” He snaps his fingers. “‘I’m fucking out of here.’”

Instead of tossing the pills back, Eddie tries to take them as discreetly as possible. Then he gulps down water. Something about the texture of the pills as he swallows them makes him feel faintly sick, so he takes an ice cube into his mouth and lets it melt on his tongue.

“All right, enough of the intellectual shit,” Richie says. “Would you rather have eyes for nipples or nipples for eyes?”

Eddie spits his ice cube back into his glass, where it makes a loud _plop_ and splashes over the table. Richie bypasses laughter and goes straight into semi-hysterical giggling, arms wrapping around himself and covering his face. Eddie focuses on solving the problem, which is the spill, and shakes out his napkin to mop it up. His silverware tumbles across the table and very nearly falls off, which would be Richie’s fault, but Eddie catches his fork at the last moment.

“Why the fuck would I want to have nipples for eyes?” Eddie hisses, scrabbling to get his silverware back in order on the table while he blots with the napkin.

This apparently makes the situation worse, because Richie starts laughing harder but completely silently, starting to melt into the maroon vinyl.

Which is how the waitress finds him when she comes back with their drinks. She looks at Richie in some alarm and then towards Eddie, as though he’s the expert on the situation.

“Thank you,” Eddie says, and starts unwrapping his straw.

Richie struggles to a semi-upright position and wheezes a thank you to the waitress.

“We’re going to need a few minutes,” Eddie says, because he hasn’t even looked at his menu yet.

“That’s fine,” the waitress assures them, which for some reason gets Richie laughing again. She gives Eddie an _is everything okay?_ sort of look and when Eddie nods, she just gives them a gentle smile and walks away.

“I’m just saying,” Richie gasps, using the inside voice he learned somewhere in the last two decades, “I think about it sometimes, because my first instinct is to be like _my eyes are down here_ , except whoops, they’re not.”

This is baffling information about Richie but somehow less surprising than the quick lesson in musical theory.

“What do you _mean_ you think your eyes are down there?” Eddie hisses at him.

“I mean I _know_ my eyes aren’t there, but haven’t you ever wanted to be like—” Richie’s hands flail somewhere in the middle of a performance of “Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes,” gesturing at his whole body in his state of recline as he continues to sink into the vinyl. “—my tits are down here?”

“No?” Eddie almost squawks. He lowers his head and drags on his straw full of Sierra Mist like it can give him the strength to deal with this conversational topic. It tastes functionally identical to Sprite, but he thinks the bubbles might be smaller. That’s probably not imaginary, right?

“I promise it’s a very real impulse,” Richie says seriously, which Eddie does not doubt, because he has been looking. In fact now it’s kind of hard to keep his eyes up where Richie’s face is. “But imagine, like—cutting holes in my shirts and being like—” He widens his eyes and moves them back and forth like the pendulum on a clock, his fingers pointing out in the general direction of his nipples.

“I’m regretting not combining booze with painkillers,” Eddie says. He turns the page on his menu—not the beer and wine menu, but just the regular menu—though while he stares down at the list of appetizers he sees absolutely nothing. Then he closes the menu, covers his eyes, and asks, “So do you have two sets of eyes and no nipples? Or do your eyes and your nipples swap places?”

“Definitely two sets of eyes,” Richie says, lurching back to an upright position. As he speaks he laughs a little, so some words get coughed out on laughs at irregular intervals. “And I hope the nipple eyes are nearsighted. There’s your bifocals.”

“I feel like this is not even a question,” Eddie says. “Like, any man you ask—what the fuck else are you using your goddamn nipples for? What you’re saying is, _Would you like to exchange this vestigial_ —” He pauses, thinking.

“Oh, _vestigial_ ,” Richie says, laughing. “He’s pulling out the SAT words, folks.”

Like Richie didn’t say _disparate_ earlier. “Shush,” Eddie says. “I’m trying to remember what the word for nipples is, if not organs.”

“Uh, _probably not organs_ ,” Richie says.

“Shush,” Eddie says again, and then gives up and looks it up on his phone.

“You’re so fuckin’ old,” Richie says.

Eddie glares at him. Across the table Richie mimics his posture exactly, holding his imaginary phone out at arm’s length and peering down at it. Eddie lets his elbow fall to the table and just glowers. Richie holds the pose for several seconds before he breaks and returns to being himself again.

“— _vestigial anatomical structure_ ,” Eddie finishes crisply, then sets his phone on the table and pushes it away. “For working—organs. Eyes are organs.”

“No, no, continue with the anatomy lesson,” Richie says, head tilted and eyes teasing.

Eddie pulls a face and turns back to the appetizers page of his menu. “The boards behind you?”

He puts both hands on the table and twists to look, making a theatrical groaning sound that ends in a serious, “Yes.”

“Are they specials?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Read them to me.”

Eddie needs a vision test. It’s probably not leprosy-related. And he needs to put something in his stomach, quickly, before the painkillers start working and he gets side-effects.

Richie reads the specials aloud and almost immediately lapses into the Swedish chef. Somehow Eddie can still understand him, even when he breaks the impression to snicker over an appetizer called Cry of the Tiger. He finishes a barely intelligible description of some fish cakes and then turns back to Eddie.

“I’m just saying, I’m not using my nipples,” Eddie says, his voice lowered.

Richie’s mouth wobbles, lower lip vanishing into his mouth and then reappearing again, and then he shakes his head.

“What?” Eddie prompts.

Richie shakes his head again.

For some reason Eddie’s first instinct is to kick him in the knee—but as Richie has just demonstrated, first instincts are not always right. “What?” he demands, a little more vehement.

Richie clears his throat, straightens, and says, “I just feel like you’re not considering the drawbacks of having eyes for nipples.”

“The drawbacks are having fucking eyes for nipples, Richie,” he says, and then remembers to check his volume. He looks around guiltily again, and when no one is staring at him or raising any eyebrows in his direction, he leans in a little closer to the table and says quietly, “You literally just said you would rather have eyes for nipples.”

“First of all, that is not what I said.” Richie leans back and puts his feet up on Eddie’s bench. Eddie hisses and moves to swat them away, then decides he doesn’t want to touch Richie’s shoes and yanks his hands back. “I said _sometimes_ I think about it.”

“Is this a world in which everyone has eyes for nipples, or just you?”

“Doesn’t matter,” Richie says. “But in a world in which it was just me, I would not cut little eye holes out of my shirts.”

“So you’re posing the question and you don’t have an answer?”

“Oh no, I’d definitely rather have eyes for nipples than nipples for eyes,” Richie says seriously. “I just think you’re not considering the risk factors inherent in having eyes for nipples.”

“ _I_ am not considering the _risk factors_?” Eddie demands, offended on a professional level now. “All right, fucker, tell me— _me_ —about the risk factors.”

Richie is clearly deeply amused by an angry Eddie. “Are you getting an appetizer or what?”

“Yes,” Eddie says. He frowns. “Do you want an appetizer?”

“Oh, you know I want an appetizer,” Richie says, and though there’s nothing necessarily _wrong_ with what he just said, Eddie’s shoulders hike up automatically, like nails scraping down the back of his neck.

Eddie frowns at his menu. It is apparently not strictly a Thai restaurant—Eddie definitely recognizes at least one of the dishes from the Jade of the Orient, which—as the generic and faintly uncomfortable name indicates—does mostly Chinese, so that means that this place is either an Asian fusion sort of thing or that you can just sell anything to white people in upstate New York without worrying about consistency. He tries to familiarize himself with the process: there are subheadings of _boiled_ , _salad, tam, and curries_. He blinks a couple of times at _tam_ , but since most of these also seem to be salads, he doesn’t feel particularly illuminated.

“I don’t want soup,” he decides. That sounds like a good place to be starting from: sick people eat soup, and Eddie is not sick, and he decides that he does not like soup. “Or anything like soup. I don’t like it.”

“I know,” Richie says.

Eddie looks up from the menu, but Richie still has his head lowered as he studies it. “How do you know?” he demands, more accusatory than he necessarily means to.

One of Richie’s eyebrows climbs up without him actually looking at Eddie. “You think I don’t remember your mom feeding you up on soup and tea? Literally every time you came back from a week off school you were like, _‘I peed out a third of my body weight and look, I’m so thin now my arm doesn’t hang right.’_ ” He twists a little bit in the booth, hunching his shoulders again so that his arms hang forward and apart from his body. “Which is not how skeletons work.”

Eddie thinks he vaguely remembers that week. His mother had informed him that he had a stomach flu. Unlike most of his classmates—some of whom actually got sick in class, which was always enough to send Eddie into hysterical asthma attacks in the boys’ bathroom—Eddie missed out on most unpleasant illnesses as a child. He never caught the cold that put Bill in bed with pneumonia, never caught mono, never had strange periods of feeling queasy without explanation. But he remembers her feeding him up on hot water, salt, and tea leaves—and how he stared at his empty bowl with his stomach gurgling for more fragments of noodles and thought _Jesus, I’m going to starve to death_.

“And then you’d steal my Zebra Cake,” Richie says, still without looking up.

Yes, that was true. Richie’s parents had money which meant that—back when Richie was still bringing a lunch his mom packed—he had good snacks. He had potato chips and Pringles and Starlite mints, and those chocolates shaped like barrels with the caramel in them, and he had yogurt-covered raisins, and cosmic brownies, and a Swiss roll, and Zebra Cakes, and there was a time—sixth grade and below—when both of them just accepted that Richie was going to share his dessert with him. If it was something from Little Debbie Richie would break it in half and Eddie would choose the half he wanted (a problem-solving process introduced by Bill, who as the only one with a sibling knew how to divide things in a way that eliminated complaints about who had more) and he always picked the smaller half because he felt a little guilty about taking from Richie. And then—somewhere in the middle of second grade, after Richie and Eddie had been friends for about a month—when Richie had candy for dessert, there would inexplicably be two.

“I didn’t steal it,” Eddie says slowly.

He’s thinking about the Thundercats lunchbox he begged his mom for, and the dry sandwiches she packed for him on brown bread, and how his first hit of processed sugar was actually out of Richie’s lunchbox. He knows that there were snacks in the house, but those were _for grownups_ , would _stunt Eddie’s growth_. He knows that Richie made friends with him on the playground—sort of popped up and then couldn’t be shaken off until Eddie got used to him—but he thinks he remembers Richie opening up his lunchbox and Eddie peering in and looking at him like it was the Ark of the Covenant.

“You would so,” Richie says.

“Did not. You offered.”

“I know I offered, but do you know how long it took me to convince Mags I wanted more dessert for me and my friend, and not just because I wanted to double-fist it on the playground?” He holds up both hands full of imaginary food, like some kind of medieval king eating a turkey leg and a loaf of bread at one time.

“I think that was part of why I wanted to be friends with you,” Eddie says, staring blankly but only seeing the grade school cafeteria and the way they hopped to different tables year after year.

Richie snorts. “Yeah, I don’t blame you.”

“No,” Eddie says. “Not like—” He doesn’t know how to explain that the appearance of _treats_ in a lunchbox made him think _those are for grownups_ and then think _what kind of power does this weird kid have?_ “—I thought you were cool. Because you had Zebra Cakes.”

When he looks up at Richie, Richie’s face is twisted up in a smile that looks physically painful.

“I wanna travel back in time and like, squish you,” Richie says. “Like—I feel full-on _Of Mice and Men_ right now. I’m having a _tell me about the rabbits, George_ moment.”

Eddie, who had not enjoyed having to read _Of Mice and Men_ in high school, wrinkles his nose. He can tell that Richie’s trying to find a way around the cute moratorium. “Shut up and tell me what kind of appetizer you’ll eat.”

Richie sways back and forth in his seat, a graduation of his reflexive head bobs that makes him seem almost overcome by glee. “I’m always a slut for dumplings,” he volunteers.

“I’m putting that on your fucking Wikipedia page. American comedian and dumpling slut. I’m gonna get a warning flag from the moderators being like _how do you know this_ and I’ll be able to say that I’m a fucking expert on Richie fucking Tozier. Fuck.”

The description for the dumplings says that they come in veggie or pork, and that they can be either steamed or pan-fried. Richie reserves opinion but when Eddie orders pan-fried pork dumplings he visibly relaxes in relief—Eddie guesses he would have eaten steamed veggie dumplings if Eddie had wanted them, but they’re both on the same page here.

“Protein and calories,” Eddie reminds him.

“Protein and calories. Protein and calories.”

There are six dumplings in the serving. Eddie doesn’t mind eating ground pork so much—something about the way it’s prepared makes him more confident that it’s been cooked all the way through, and he trusts it in a way that he doesn’t trust beef or poultry. The order comes with a little tray of brown sauce, thicker and sweeter than soy sauce. Eddie bites into a dumpling and immediately juice runs down his chin. He leans forward and cups a hand under his jaw to try and contain the damage.

Richie smirks at him. “How’s that treating you, Eds?”

Eddie swallows down the instinctive _don’t call me Eds_ with the half of the dumpling. Something about eating in front of Richie here makes him self-conscious in a way he doesn’t usually feel at home when he’s watching Richie eat pancakes with his bare hands but put maple syrup on potatoes. He suspects it’s the _stakes_ of the date again.

He blots at his chin with his napkin and, once he has the situation under control again, inspects the other half of his dumpling. The meat looks well-cooked, speckled with black flecks of pepper and green crunchy bits of vegetable.

“I feel kind of more okay eating pigs than other animals,” Eddie admits.

There were points in his life where he considered vegetarianism—more for food safety than any true moral compass—but it was such a hassle and he didn’t enjoy the idea of adding a nutritionist to his personal fleet of doctors; and it would cut a number of tastes out of his already-limited palate. It’s easier to have dietary restrictions in public nowadays. The vegan subculture in New York is rising, and Eddie no longer gets quite as many irate glances from restaurant staff on the work lunches where he has to enumerate his battery of imaginary allergies.

Richie raises his eyebrows. “Have you never seen that picture of the piglet wearing rain boots?”

“Oh, don’t give me a complex while I’m eating pork,” Eddie complains.

Richie punctuates his point by cramming an entire dumpling into his mouth.

“But, like—a full grown pig would definitely eat me, given the chance. I just feel like that evens the playing field a little bit. Not that there’s anything moral about factory farming, but.” He shrugs. Richie is already aware of Eddie’s thoughts about poultry farming; he can’t be surprised by the rest of his thoughts on the meat industry.

Richie leans down a little like he’s imparting a secret. “Did Mike tell you about the electric fence?”

“The what?”

“The electric fence,” Richie repeats. “It’s a fence that is electrified—”

“Fuck you,” Eddie says, more out of habit than malice. He waves a hand for Richie to move on.

Richie gives a short smile and then goes into storytelling mode. “So while the Hanlons were farming, apparently they were familiar with the local farming community. Outside of Bowers and his dad, anyway. And somewhere out in the country there are cattle ranchers, people who raise cows for milk and for butchering.”

“Yeah, I remember the Hanlons had one.” He stares at Richie pointedly, wondering if Richie remembers the time the cow licked him.

Richie nods, losing none of his momentum. “Yeah, but like—these people raised exclusively cows. Not just the one old cow and her calf, but whole herds of cows.”

Eddie nods. They passed more than a few fields of cows on their way from Bangor to Ben’s house.

“And these friends of the Hanlons, they had an electric fence,” Richie says. “As one does, sometimes, to keep their animals away from, like, roadways and shit.” He shrugs and spears another dumpling but does not eat it, instead dipping it in the sauce and then sort of dandling it on the plate idly while he makes his point. “So the husband is out in the pen with the electrified fence, and he steps further away from the gate than he normally does, and he happens to look up and realize the cows have him surrounded.”

Eddie stares at him. “Surrounded,” he repeats. “By cows.”

Richie nods.

“In the cow pen.”

“Yeah, in the cow pen,” Richie says. “With the cows. Cows are big motherfuckers, you know how it is.”

“Oh, I know how it is, I was thinking of the time you held my head in front of a cow,” Eddie says.

For a moment Richie looks blank. Then Eddie gets to watch in real time as Richie remembers and cringes. “Oh god, wasn’t its tongue blue?”

“I don’t know,” Eddie says. “I had my eyes shut. You know, because she licked my face.”

Richie sucks his lower lip into his mouth and gives such a wicked look that Eddie knows he’s about to say something horrible before he has the words lined up. “I’m just happy all your friends could be there to support you the first time you got to first base,” he says, and then snickers when Eddie steals the whole plate of dumplings.

“Yeah yeah, fuck you, you get sloppy seconds to the Hanlons’ cow,” he mutters, setting the serving plate on his side of the table out of Richie’s reach.

“Don’t get me hot,” Richie says airily, and continues his story without paying apparent attention to Eddie’s resulting blush and bulging eyes. “So the cows have him surrounded. Much bigger than the guy, you know. And they start driving him toward the electric fence. Like they’re gonna hold him up against it and kill him.”

Eddie thinks about the mechanics of this for several seconds. It makes sense that a cow would be able to withstand an electric shock that a human would find more devastating, based on body mass alone. How many cows would it take to electrocute a person to death? If they used their horns—do female cows have proper horns?—would they even have the problem of conduction?

“Was this in Derry?” Eddie asks, baffled. It makes sense that cows would have murderous intent in Derry of all places.

Richie shrugs one shoulder and shakes his head. “Don’t think so. Can’t remember. You’d have to ask Mike.”

“Are cows _smart enough_ to do that?”

“Apparently this breed of cow was,” Richie says. “Anyway, the guy got free, but they don’t buy that breed of cow anymore.”

Eddie is flashing back to those rare outings when the Denbroughs brought him along with Bill and Georgie to the Maine State fair, where they lined up outside the cattle barns and fed hay to the loud mooing cows, who seemed to be largely disembodied heads with how they were secured. How Bill and Eddie would pet absently at one cow’s ears while Georgie—very small in those days—stood back at a distance holding Mrs. Denbrough’s hand, until the fact that Bill and Eddie were petting a cow made Georgie brave and he would walk over and Bill would boost him up so he could look in the cow’s big black eyes with the long delicate eyelashes.

“Fucking murder cows,” Eddie says, baffled. He spears another dumpling from the plate and dips it in the sauce. “But that was like—just murder, right? They didn’t want to kill and eat him?” It’s different from pigs. He’s heard that if a person falls in a pig pen the pigs just assume the human is food. There’s no malice in it.

“I do not understand the inscrutable exhortations of the bovine soul,” Richie says, completely seriously.

Eddie takes a bite out of his dumpling, leaning forward so that any juice spills over his plate this time. He chews and swallows before he says, “I mean, if it were Derry, I’d be like, yeah, those cows are definitely committing murder, but, like—it wouldn’t be the cows, you know?”

“Oh I know,” Richie says. “I feel like in Derry you can—” He winces and then visibly revises what he was about to say. “In terms of _meat_ ,” he says. “It’s kind of a dog eat dog world. Like, a Derry pig is definitely going to kill and eat you, you get a pass on feeling bad about eating that pig.”

“Even if it’s a little pig in rainboots,” Eddie says.

“Oh yeah, a piglet in rainboots in Derry is absolutely gonna fuck you up,” Richie says. “Maybe that’s why Dad never kept kosher when I was a kid.”

“I don’t think that’s theologically sound.”

“Theological, schmeological, half of the rules about what is and isn’t kosher are oriented around _this is how you don’t get trichinosis_ ,” Richie says. “It’s not like fish on Fridays like the Catholics. Catholics _want_ to get tapeworms because it makes them suffer more. Bigger net gain.”

Eddie, who grew up Protestant, doesn’t know enough about Catholicism to respond to that properly but he’s pretty sure it’s offensive.

He feels better with some food in his stomach. A little less worried about the ticking time bomb of the painkillers in his stomach—which are probably taking effect now, based on how his ribs are being less insistent in their complaints. Instead he surveys the entrée menu, aware—as Richie steals the dumpling plate back—that the waitress will be back soon and if they keep sending her away so they can have stupid conversations it’s going to make it annoying for her to do her job.

“So,” Richie says, mouth full of dumpling, “on a scale of one to bullshit, how allergic are you actually to cashews?”

Eddie lowers his gaze to the menu again. “I’ve never actually had a reaction,” he admits.

There’s a little trace of the sweet brown sauce on his lower lip. He touches his tongue to it, considering the logistics of proteins for an entrée. Apparently any entrée comes with a protein of his choice—or veggies, if he wants to have mixed veggies. The separate prices are listed below the description, indicating the relative expenses of chicken to beef to shrimp. Does Eddie want shrimp? He feels like it’s very easy to tell when shrimp are cooked correctly based on their color and whether or not the vein has been properly removed. He feels like he has vague memories of eating popcorn shrimp when he was a kid—that’s another imaginary allergy he acquired at some point during the past thirty years.

Richie is quiet, but quiet for longer than chewing and swallowing a dumpling actually takes. When Eddie glances up at him—he can handle a disgusted or mocking response from Richie, but _pity_ about the way that Eddie has lived his life would be intolerable—Richie is engaged in a thousand-yard stare over the rims of his glasses, eyes burning a hole through Eddie’s mouth.

He whisks his tongue back into his mouth, almost alarmed. Richie looks down, centering the little ramekin of brown sauce on the plate and then carefully positioning the plate towards the edge of the table. Eddie appreciates that he’s making the waitress’s job a little easier.

He swallows. “Why?” he asks.

Richie raises his eyebrows and says, deliberately casual, “Just want to make sure that if I eat cashews and then breathe on you, you’re not gonna _realistically die_ on me, are you?” He drops down into his Eddie impression for the quote, sounding more Manhattan than Eddie thinks he has ever sounded in his life.

Eddie scowls at him, his first instinct always to return fire. “You’re not asking about breathing on me,” he says, keeping his voice low. They’ve done more kissing in the last week than Eddie can remember in his entire adult life. He knows what it means when Richie is suddenly staring at him like he’s trying to focus sunlight through a magnifying glass.

Richie defaults to a blandly innocent expression. “Why, Mr. Kaspbrak,” he says, going inexplicably southern belle. “I don’t know what kind of _presumption_ you are bringing to the table on this here evening, but—” At Eddie’s _Lord-give-me-patience_ expression he breaks and laughs, leaning back a little in the booth. In his own voice he murmurs, “But no, I’m not.” And he tilts his head a little to look at Eddie sidelong.

Eddie, already feeling pleasantly steadied by the food, feels heat gather in his stomach. He sort-of knew that Richie was going to kiss him at the end of the date—it’s what you do on a date, whole genres of movie are based around it—but he likes the idea that Richie is sitting over there _thinking about it_. And honestly part of him is pleased that Richie’s being _considerate_ and exercising _forethought_ and thinking about what a bummer it would be if Eddie suddenly went into anaphylactic shock from prolonged exposure to Richie’s mouth.

“Oh my god, order the damn cashews,” he grumbles. He doesn’t necessarily want to be _transparent_ in the restaurant, and he’s a little mad about how _easy_ it is for Richie to get to him. There’s something just shy of a shiver building up in his shoulders. But he still glances up from the menu to see Richie’s pleased, faintly smug grin.

There are a number of dishes, some of which seem more pronounceable than others. Eddie doesn’t necessarily want to choose his entrée based on what would be easiest to say out loud to the waitress.

“I’ve never had curry,” he says before. What if he doesn’t like it?

“I could live on curry,” Richie almost sighs, such transparent longing in his voice that Eddie feels the hairs on the backs of his arms raise. “Like, there was a good six months when I was new to L.A. where I just ate samosas. That was it. I could do that with curry, and I’d probably be less likely to get scurvy. There are a lot of curries out there.”

“What—” Eddie winces. “What is it?” He knows that curry powder exists, but he’s not totally clear on whether it’s a seasoning or like a soup.

“Basically like stew,” Richie says. “Like—stew, if stew were sauce. You know the—” He waggles his fingers in a way that sort of conveys _between_ -ness, something that smoothes the way. “It’s so fucking good, dude. Like—you’ve got green curry, right? And that tastes green, like—they lean more into the—” He waves his hands. “You know when you eat mint?”

Eddie blinks at him. “When I eat mint _what_?”

“No, like the whole concept of mint.”

Is there mint curry? Is it like eating mint jelly is mostly exclusive to lamb? Eddie looks at him in some alarm.

“You know how mint tastes different from cheese?” Richie persists.

“I see why you didn’t go into work as a food critic.”

Instead of being offended Richie huffs a laugh, leaning forward. “Like, green curry tastes green, kind of. It’s like— _fresh_. Cilantro. I think I’m trying to describe cilantro.”

Eddie avoided the gene that makes cilantro taste like soap to him, but he also can’t say that he’s had a lot of cilantro in his life. He doesn’t know if he actually likes cilantro, but he’s trying to be open to new flavors. “Uh-huh,” he prompts, wary.

“And red curry tastes different,” Richie says, and then visibly stalls out trying to describe in what way.

“Are you sure you’re not just super susceptible to color coding?” Eddie asks.

“Red curry is more like cheese and green curry is more like mint,” he offers.

“Okay, but do I want to eat curry?” Eddie asks. “Is it gonna come out like soup?”

“Probably,” Richie says. “You don’t, like, eat everything out of the curry and then drink the curry like it’s cereal with milk. I mean, I would, but I don’t think that’s how it works. And there’s, like, dry curries, which is stuff cooked in curry powder without coconut milk.”

“Are you getting curry?” Eddie asks, because he thinks that this will get him further than asking Richie to describe abstract sensory experiences and trying to make decisions based on them.

“Yeah,” Richie says easily.

Which is how Eddie decides. “Okay, I’m getting pad thai. What kind of curry are you getting?” If Richie says anything related to fish balls Eddie’s going to bail.

“Gang massaman,” Richie says, as though this means anything to Eddie. “I’m basic.”

He quickly goes to the page of curries and looks at the description. He doesn’t know what tamarind sauce tastes like, but the description of onions, potatoes, carrots, and cashews all seem familiar and reassuring. He looks back up at Richie and gives a short nod.

Richie is grinning. “I’m sorry, did I say I’d be sharing my curry with you?”

Part of Eddie squirms at his own presumption, though he knows Richie’s just giving him shit. “You implied it,” he replies flatly, thinking about kissing again.

Richie pulls a face. “Okay, but I’m not, like, gonna baby bird you in the restaurant.”

The mental image is so upsetting that Eddie makes a gagging sound and glares at Richie for putting that in his head. Richie is clearly delighted.

“Okay, okay, I like pad thai, we can share,” he says.

When the pad thai actually comes, Eddie’s a bit taken aback by the level of assembly that goes into the dish. Richie’s curry comes in a bowl approximately the size of a lunar crater, and it looks very much like orange soup. He has a tiny bowl of steamed white rice on the side. Eddie’s plate comes with a concentrated main dish of noodles and shrimp—but also has little heaps of bean sprouts, diced peanuts, red chili flakes, and whole shallots around the edge of the plate. He squints at the little half-lime accusingly. The mechanics of adding these to taste—which, from the presence of the pepper flakes, he guesses he is supposed to do—while also sharing with Richie is baffling.

“Second-guessing?” Richie asks when the waitress leaves. He puts one hand on the edge of his bowl in such a way that he could easily pass the whole dish across the table to Eddie.

“No,” Eddie says quickly, because it smells good. It’s not like he feels surprised or upset at what the dish turned out to be. He’s just a little stunned by how customizable the dish seems. “I just—” He picks up his spoon and hovers it over the various regions of his plate, unsure where to start.

“Oh, dude, just mix the whole thing in,” Richie says. “Not all the chilis, ’cause you’ll straight up die, but like, trust me.”

Eddie has to get his fork to separate the noodles properly when mixing them in with bean sprouts and diced peanuts. He frowns and then carefully spoons chili powder into the mix, glancing back up at Richie for confirmation, like they’re playing with hazardous material here. Richie nods at him. Then Eddie picks up the tiny lime. His left hand is sufficiently strong to squeeze juice over the whole thing. He inspects the shrimp carefully and is pleased by the lack of vein on them, and then carefully removes the tail with his knife before he gathers up a big spoonful. He’s pretty sure that he got everything on there except the shallots—he’s not sure what he’s supposed to do with those, since they’re too long to eat properly.

He takes the spoonful. It’s not what he expected. He chews slowly, hearing the bean sprouts and the peanuts crush under his teeth. The fine noodles and the bits of scrambled egg are in comparison very soft. It’s a pleasant texture.

The taste, though, is surprising. He expected the warmth, sweetness, and faint saltiness of the noodles. But the bean sprouts are _fresh_ the way that Richie described the green curry, a faint contrast; and he can taste the sour of the lime juice but it’s balanced by the sweet sauce the noodles were done in; and over everything there’s the pleasant heat of the chili flakes—more than he’s used to, but _interesting_ and pleasant. It’s all _flavor_. There’s so much _flavor,_ and instead of being overpowering the way that things that taste the _same_ can be, all of the different parts _contrast_ in ways he’s not accustomed to. And it’s good. It’s not like he’s out here eating scrambled eggs and chocolate chips—everything is very _fragrant_ and pleasant and enjoyable. He’s not any prize cook, but he can tell this is something he couldn’t make for himself—there have to be secret sauces, secret spices here. He swallows.

“Oh,” he says.

Richie bursts into laughter. Eddie looks up at him instead of at his plate of delicious pad thai and sees that Richie is hunched down, elbows on the table, his index finger and thumb fitted over his face like he can contain his volume in his hand. His whole body shakes and when he opens his scrunched eyes to look at Eddie again he almost immediately has to shut them, his whole face turning red.

“What?” Eddie demands, instantly defensive and getting angrier the more Richie goes on—which he is, he’s doubling over to brace himself on the table.

“You look like you can see Jesus,” Richie guffaws _sotto voce_ , a loud whisper that Eddie can hear over the music _on the pentatonic scale_ playing through the speakers. “Oh my god, you look like you can see eternity, fuck.” He ducks half under the table.

“Shut up! Shut up!” Eddie hisses back, looking around to see if anyone’s watching Richie just lose his shit in the booth, but he can feel himself smiling too. It’s not a bad thing to laugh about something _nice_ , something _pleasant_ , and he thinks he _likes_ pad thai—and doesn’t that open whole culinary doors for him? Isn’t it nice that, at his age, he can discover new things? “God, I can’t take you anywhere.”

Richie is mostly visible from the neck up at this point, one arm bent high so that his hand can keep him above the table. His eyes are streaming and he keeps wiping at them with his other hand.

“It’s not that funny!” Eddie whispers at him.

Which is, of course, when the waitress shows up. “How is everything?” she asks, and then looks at Richie’s state of collapse and back at Eddie for reassurance.

“Everything is very good,” Eddie says in his professional voice, and smiles, and tries to ignore the huge deranged man on the other side of the table while she stands there.

“Good,” she says. “Let me know if there’s anything else I can get you.” She looks at Eddie’s mostly-empty glass. “Would you like another Sierra Mist?”

“Yes, please,” Eddie says.

She turns to Richie and his mostly empty Thai iced tea. “Would you like a…?”

Richie is struggling his way back to a sitting position. “Yes please,” he manages, wiping at his eyes.

When she leaves again, Eddie glares at him. “You are seven years old,” he says. “You have actually not aged since I have met you, you’re still fucking seven years old.”

“So what you’re saying is, the magic’s still there,” Richie says. He actually blots at his eyes with his napkin and then tucks it back onto his lap, occasionally jerking with sudden giggles. “God, I just wanna watch you eat random shit, like—” He spreads both hands to indicate the new horizons and then picks up his utensils.

Eddie, suddenly possessed by a new short-term goal of fitting as much pad thai in his mouth as possible, watches Richie carefully section out his tiny bowl of rice. He separates maybe a spoonful from the little dome, and then he dumps the larger portion into his giant bowl of curry and stirs. Then he spoons out some of the bright orange liquid into the bowl. Eddie doesn’t catch on to what he’s doing until he’s carefully arranging a single chunk of potato, a zigzag strip of carrot, and a piece of chicken into the tiny bowl. This he pushes across toward Eddie.

“Try that,” he says, and then settles into eat his own food.

Eddie looks at it warily but Richie has actually presented it in a way that resembles soup as little as possible. He expects the potato to be hot; he sucks his spoon clean and then eats a little of the curry and rice. It’s sweet, which surprises him somehow. The components seem more familiar than the ones in the pad thai, but still very flavorful. He can identify cinnamon, but that’s about the extent of his culinary knowledge. There’s still a savory contrasting undertone to it, almost sour but not quite. He blows on the piece of potato and chews contemplatively.

“So remember when I told Ben I could taste all the ingredients on the sandwich?” Eddie asks.

Richie’s mouth twists up in that suppressed smile again and he nods. “Which I know for a fact you could not, you would have thrown such a fit about the anchovies,” he says, a laugh in his voice.

Eddie stares at him. “Ben fed me _anchovies_?”

Richie starts grinning as he rats Ben out. “I mean, yeah, there was Caesar dressing on it, there’s anchovies in Caesar dressing.”

“And you _let him_?” Eddie demands, like the whole point of Richie is to defend him from accidentally consuming anchovies.

Richie shakes his head. “You were having a good time, man, I wasn’t gonna get in your way.”

Eddie makes a low growling noise, sets his spoon down, and picks up his phone to text Ben _You fed me anchovies???_ Richie giggles in the background.

“So is this your way of telling me that the drugs have kicked in?” he asks.

“Oh god, yeah,” Eddie sighs. He sets his phone down and takes a deep ribcage-expanding breath. There’s the familiar ache, but it’s manageable.

“I can kind of tell because you’ve got—” He gestures to his own eyes, which he widens pointedly. “—lanterns, over there.”

Eddie grouses, “That’s just how my eyes look.”

Richie’s spoon plonks into the bottom of his dish with a metallic clink and he stifles more laughter. “I mean, I knew that, I didn’t think you’d say it,” he says, as though Eddie could possibly be unaware of the ratio of his eyes to the rest of his face. Whatever. It’s not worth getting upset about. He scowls at Richie, which just keeps Richie laughing. “When you put on the headlamp it was—” He mimes turning his head, one hand held out at a distance to indicate the beam of light, and then mimes being blinded in turn.

“You shone a flashlight in my face,” Eddie says.

“You were trying to rip my hands off.”

“Yeah, because you were trying to rip stuff out of my hands!”

“That’s completely different, because if you noticed, these fuckers—” He holds up both hands, palms facing Eddie, and waggles his fingers. “—are actually attached to my fucking arms, so that’s what we call disproportionate retribution.”

“Oh, like my eyeballs aren’t attached to my face.”

“You were hissing like you have rabies.”

Eddie, still mulling over _what the fuck are his hands so big for?_ replies, “I _do_ have rabies, fuck you.”

Richie has to set his spoon down again as he wheezes.

Rabies is one of the few diseases that Eddie’s hypochondria never really capitalized on. He was almost never in contact with any animals, and it’s so fast-acting that he was always pretty sure he did not have it. This means that it’s one of the few illnesses he feels okay with joking about.

“This has all been a long con,” he says, leaning into the bit.

“You’re gonna give me rabies?”

“You’re gonna _beg_ me to give you rabies,” he says, still just talking shit, because Richie started out with _nipples for eyes_ , fuck.

Richie, though.

Richie _blushes_.

Eddie, torn between realizing what he said after the fact and staring at Richie in disbelief, pauses in the middle of eating his pad thai to watch the flush climb up Richie’s neck. Apparently this isn’t subtle, because Richie grimaces and twists his face away, brandishing his spoon in Eddie’s general direction.

“Fuck off. Don’t look at me.”

This is incredibly rewarding. “Wow,” Eddie says.

“Do _not_ look at me.”

“Sorry, I just didn’t realize you got off on _Old Yeller_ , if I’d known that I’d have been more careful in my phrasing.”

Despite visible embarrassment Richie snorts at that. A desperate, opiate-loose part of Eddie’s brain sends up a message to the surface: _God, I love him, I want to do this all the time, I just want to fucking talk to him_. He tucks his left arm closer around his ribs and keeps eating his pad thai.

They don’t have proper serving dishes but eventually Richie pushes his tureen of curry closer into the middle of the table and Eddie mostly uses his spoon for that, and he slides his plate of pad thai to the side so that Richie can reach across the table and steal some if he wants. Without them having to ask, the waitress returns with two plates for sharing, and Eddie feels a faint prickling blush around his jaw. Sharing food is innocent, he’s seen people split dishes at work dinners, but the way that Eddie keeps stealing potato directly out of the bowl Richie’s eating out of is definitely not something two guys just grabbing dinner do. There’s no change in the polite professional expression on her face, but Eddie still feels his radar going _does she think we’re on a date? Does she know we’re on a date?_ in action in the back of his head.

Eddie has to get a takeaway box for the rest of his pad thai, but this is okay, because Richie needs one for his curry as well. “And we’re getting dessert, right?” he asks.

Eddie blinks, a little startled. He has not, thus far, been a man who eats much dessert. He’s also a little worried about whether he has room for more dessert. But he’s definitely impressed by Thai cuisine so far and he would like to see more.

“What do they have?”

They have mango and sticky rice, and then a standard array of ice creams that Eddie could get basically anywhere. Mango and sticky rice doesn’t sound very elaborate, but Richie assures him that the rice is special.

“It’s good,” Richie says.

And the fact that Richie wants it is good enough for Eddie. Until the waitress brings out a square plate with two spoons, Eddie doesn’t even realize that by not ordering, he is tacitly agreeing to _share_ a dessert with Richie, which is _definitely_ not a thing that straight men getting dinner together do.

Well, they could. But if any of Eddie’s coworkers offered to split a dessert with him at a restaurant Eddie would start worrying about their intentions.

He’s embarrassed enough that he just sort of meekly takes the spoon and smiles at the waitress as she leaves. And Richie is right, sticky rice is very good. It’s hot and sweet, and the mango is cold and tangy. Eddie pretends to fight with Richie over specific slices of mango—“No, not that one!”—which involves a lot of dueling spoons on the plate. By the time the waitress comes back with the check he’s mostly forgotten to be self-conscious.

“Take your time, no rush,” she says. It’s a slow evening at the restaurant. Eddie’s sort of grateful that it’s not a high-traffic Friday or Saturday, because that would be _conspicuous_ date behavior. As it is, they still could be just ill-mannered chucklefucks getting Thai on a work night.

“Thanks,” Richie says.

They both stare for long moments at the fortune cookies.

“I’m just gonna,” Richie says, and prods them off of the little plastic tray with his spoon.

“Yeah,” Eddie says. It’s such a stupid and insignificant form of trauma that he feels okay joking about it, but he’s also definitely never going to eat another fortune cookie in his entire life. He reaches for his wallet.

“Oh, are you…?” Richie asks.

Eddie freezes and looks up to find Richie watching him. They look at each other for several moments before Eddie blurts, “I mean, I just thought—”

“Do you want—?”

Another long moment of silence.

Then Eddie says, “We’re not doing this, fucking split it,” and throws his debit card at Richie.

Richie’s answering laughter is low and somehow soothing.

* * *

Despite a certain low-level humming background anxiety, Eddie does fall asleep in the car this time. One moment he’s watching Richie bob his head along with “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” through the speakers, and then there’s color behind his eyelids and phantom shapes and people moving. He doesn’t wake up until the car slows to turn onto the laneway up to Ben’s house. Then he overcorrects, grabbing for the takeout containers on his lap, sitting up, and going, “Gnuh!”

“Jesus!” Richie says, laughing a little in something like disbelief. “Guess I don’t have to ask you how you slept, huh?”

Eddie clutches the takeout, very aware of how liquid the gang massaman is and the likelihood it will leak into the plastic bag. “What?” he asks. Then he realizes that, yes, time has passed. It’s very dark in the car. Everything seems to be painted in shades of dark blue. He can see the lines of Richie’s knuckles where his hands rest on the steering wheel, the joints and then the lulls between.

In the neutral space of trees and the surrounding darkness, Ben’s house looks almost bright. They left the light on over the stairs. Eddie looks at the glowing glass box and sighs at realizing they didn’t draw any of the curtain panels, basically advertising to anyone—though it’s unlikely there were any witnesses to their carelessness with Ben’s house—that there was nobody home for several hours. The trade-off is that the house is basically cross-sectioned for the viewer, meaning that it’s pretty clear there’s no _uninvited guests_ in the house right now either.

The part of him that still feels paranoid, that still dreams about people standing over him while he sleeps, is almost relieved. It’s definitely not the mood he wants to be in on the way home from his first date in eight years.

A good date, too. Fuck.

He sighs again and leans his head against the passenger window, pushing his hand over his brow.

“Huh?” Richie asks.

Eddie doesn’t know how to say _I’m worried that the whole space-clown incident permanently ruined our ability to be confident in our safety_ , and he’s pretty sure that if he did, it would ruin the mood. So instead he just says, “It’s so tacky.”

Richie laughs. “Oh god, we can never tell him.”

“I know.” They can make fun of Bill’s books all they want—Bill gets a certain dead-eyed look when they start discussing his written work—but they can’t bully Ben the same way. Even before Ben _loaned them his big glass house_ and didn’t bother asking for rent or a favor later down the line or anything else.

As Richie parks, Eddie experiences something very close to time dilation as he looks up the stairs to the house. In all the movies, the end of the first date is when the couple has a first kiss. Eddie—he spots Silver tucked relatively safely under the porch—has already done that in spectacular fashion. But he feels that if they’re going through the cultural rituals they ought to follow all of them. Richie has sort of already paved that path by asking weird questions about cashews. Eddie is in favor.

The little representation of Richie that lives in Eddie’s head asks, _What, you want to eat nuts out of his mouth?_

Which as a mental image is so bizarre that Eddie pushes his whole face against the cool glass and groans at himself.

“What?” Richie sounds increasingly concerned. Eddie hears the click as he unbuckles his seatbelt.

“I’m fine,” he says, except that he fell asleep in the car so his mouth tastes like death, and he doesn’t know if Richie is going to want to kiss him with sleep-breath, and stairs are his enemy but he can’t decide which is worse: the mental image of Richie kissing him very formally at the foot of the stairs and then _Eddie having to drag himself up that flight of stairs_ while Richie follows him and pretends that this isn’t awkward at all—not his forte—or the idea of Eddie dragging himself up the stairs and Richie kissing him at the top when he’s panting and trying to catch his breath.

 _For the love of God,_ he tells himself, _you’re forty, if you want to kiss the man you can do it your damn self._

Which is a compelling argument and makes some of the tension in Eddie’s gut relax.

“Can you get the food?” he asks.

“Sure,” says Richie.

Eddie carefully passes over the precarious stack of containers balanced in the plastic bag. They’re still body-warm from being held in his lap. His hands now free, he opens the door and climbs out, bracing the bottom of his ribcage as he stands up straight and takes a deep breath.

The night air smells good. Familiar, somehow. It’s dark through the leaves, and faintly cold, the end of a summer night even though it’s September. Blinking yellow lights appear out by the trees. Fireflies.

He thinks he might understand now why Ben picked here, of all places, to make his home. It reminds Eddie of summer in Derry— _true_ summer in Derry, without the constant threat of fear and death. That’s what this smell is. It’s what he smelled when he trudged home at night with either Richie or Bill at his side, knowing that he was going to get in trouble but happy for the day out anyway.

When he turns around, Richie is looking at him across the roof of the car.

“Hm?” he asks.

Richie shakes his head. “Nothing.” He drops his eyes.

Eddie goes into the backseat to get the bag of shirts—and, presumably, Richie’s other shirt and his leather jacket—and that’s when he remembers the three-foot-tall wooden giraffe. It is propped almost tenderly on the driver’s side seat, and buckled into place.

“Goddamn it, Richie, he mumbles, sagging in place. Richie starts laughing as he opens the door on the other side. “Can you get the goddamn giraffe?”

Richie laughs louder. The sound seems to echo off of the trees, the car. That imaginary knot in Eddie’s chest loosens another few notches. Richie’s laugh feels like an exorcism, like a force field that can drive unpleasant things away. How could anything bad ever happen when Richie’s laughing like that?

Eddie’s so stupid for him. So stupid. It feels nice.

He hikes up the stairs, one Macy’s bag clutched in each hand. By the time he’s standing at the top he can hear the blood flowing in his head and his breathing is coming heavy. But he has a moment to stand and catch his breath as Richie observes, “Shit,” and bounds up the steps to unlock the door for him. Eddie has to lean back to make room for him, but he doesn’t necessarily mind it—as long as he’s _careful where he swings that fucking giraffe, Jesus_. By the time Richie pushes the door open he finds he’s not at all afraid of things that hide in the shadows. Some kind of serenity is descending over him. A cloud sinking low and turning to fog and mist.

“Okay,” Richie says. Eddie hears his hand slide on the wall inside the door, and then the light flicks on, bright yellow and warm. Half of Richie’s face is immediately thrown into relief. His nose casts a triangular shadow across his cheek. He does a little theatrical sweep of his arm to gesture Eddie into the house first.

Eddie doesn’t move.

“What?” Richie asks, eyes round with concern.

Eddie almost rolls his eyes, but he feels good. “Kiss me, dumbass.”

“Oh,” Richie says.

The next thing Eddie hears is the thunk of the leftovers dropping to the porch. Immediately Eddie stiffens—the curry might _spill_ , damn it! “Richie!”

But Richie is suddenly taking up all of the space, crowding Eddie back against the porch railing. “Hm,” he says agreeably.

Eddie mutters, “God,” in complete exasperation before he gives up and drops the Macy’s bags.

Richie puts a hand to his cheek, gently, carefully, and Eddie closes his eyes, and they kiss. Richie’s lips are tense and it takes a moment for Eddie to realize it’s because Richie’s _smiling_ into it, and that’s sweet. Eddie sighs against him, a little cloud of contentment between them. He reaches down and puts his hands on Richie’s hips, but the tail of the dress shirt is overlong—because it’s made to go with _dress pants_ and be _tucked in_ , Richie—so he hikes it up a little so he can put his hands on Richie’s hips, hook his fingers through the belt loops. His chest is still working a little harder than normal to get his breath, but he doesn’t mind it so much. It feels appropriate here. Richie tilts his head a little and the point of his nose touches Eddie’s cheek as he starts trying to open Eddie’s mouth properly. Eddie lets him. He feels pliant, he feels cooperative; he feels sort of tired, but in the way that he does after a good run, like he’s accomplished something. Richie’s warm, and instead of pushing him into the wooden railing he just holds one arm braced around Eddie, holding him up. This is good. It just feels good.

Eddie slides his fingers up from the boundary of his waistband and onto the soft skin above his hips. He feels burning hot, and when Eddie touches him he jerks back with a hiss.

“You’re fucking _freezing_ ,” he complains, voice quiet and rough at the same time. One of his hands drops to cover one of Eddie’s. Instead of pulling him away, he holds Eddie’s fingers tight to his skin through his shirt. He warms him up. Eddie can feel his sides stretch, his belly expand, as he breathes through the discomfort of Eddie’s cold touch, but he doesn’t push him away.

Eddie hums through his nose and tilts his head back a little to kiss him again—just a little, just because Richie’s being sweet and he likes it. He’s too self-conscious of his breathing to deepen the kiss though, and even though he knows standing and necking at the door is a cliché, it makes him feel like butter on toast. He tilts his head back further to break the kiss and then looks at Richie through eyes that don’t want to open all the way. Richie is backlit, but Eddie can see that his eyes are very dark.

“Okay,” he says, and tugs his hands away. Richie lets him go with a long slide across the denim of his jeans. “Okay, I gotta—” He drops his head. “—brush my teeth, can you put the food in the fridge?”

Then he realizes that, tucked in the crook of the arm Richie looped around him so cavalierly, is Woodie the three-foot-tall wooden giraffe.

“God _damn it_ , Richie.”

“What?” Richie asks blankly, and then he follows Edide’s gaze and goes, “Oh.”

A laugh bubbles up out of him. “Okay, okay.” He pushes at Richie’s chest—even through the shirt he’s very warm, and not exactly firm, but less yielding than his soft sides. If they keep standing out here Eddie’s just going to put his hands all over him, and while it seems like Richie would be okay with that, Eddie does actually want to brush his teeth so he can kiss him properly. He nudges Richie back enough that he can stoop to pick up the Macy’s bags and hurry through the door.

He definitely rushes through the dentist-recommended two-minute brushing his teeth in the bathroom. Whatever. He can be more thorough again later. Out in the kitchen he can hear the refrigerator door open, the electronic hum telling him that Richie is putting the food away, the seal of the door shutting again. Eddie fills the cap of the mouthwash and swills from it, tilting his head to the side to keep the Listerine off the tooth with the stab wound in it. He needs to do something about that, but almost ten at night after a date feels like too late to do much about it. Maybe he should gargle with saltwater like Dr. Tozier suggested instead? Richie might not want to kiss him if he tastes like saltwater.

He leaves the Macy’s bags between the sinks on the bathroom counter and staggers out into the main room. There he finds Richie kneeling on the floor, trying to position the much-taller Woodie the wooden giraffe beside Goldie the golden turtle statue so that their mouths line up and they look like they’re kissing. Richie seems to be having trouble getting Woodie to cooperate as the hypotenuse without falling to one side or the other.

Eddie, who feels like he thundered in with all the force of a parade of elephants, freezes to watch this odd sculpture project. The whole room feels too quiet.

Richie looks up at him. His feet are bare now. He sits with his toes curled under his weight in a frankly impressive stretch that Eddie wouldn’t have expected him to be capable of. Eddie is perpetually baffled by how Richie’s feet just refuse to be gross, no matter what. They look very pink against the shag carpet’s shades of black and silvery gray. Between the new shirt, the dark jeans, and the sheer vulnerability of bare feet, he’s somehow _arresting_. Richie Tozier, a study in contrasts.

Eddie has it bad.

“You know, now that I think about it,” he says, his voice broad and faux-casual, “this is not what I would have chosen for you to walk in on me doing. Can I get a do-over?”

“No,” Eddie says. “Get up.”

There’s apparently some finagling to get Richie to a standing position, proving after all that he is a forty-year-old man. Eddie watches him unfold his legs and brace himself on first Goldie and then a side table to get to his feet, and there’s an almost alarming _crack_ as Richie stands up straight and holds his arms out at both sides in that little _ta-da_ again.

Eddie needs him. That’s the only word for it. So stupid. He walks across the room. In the moment before they actually touch Richie stands a little straighter, looking almost alarmed, but he kisses Eddie back without hesitation. Eddie runs one hand up his chest and feels him shiver, and opens his mouth for him.

Richie breaks the kiss to say, “Oh, you actually meant brushing your teeth.” His lips brush against Eddie’s as he forms the words.

Eddie has one hand on Richie’s shoulder and the other on the inside of his elbow, gripping at his forearm. He pulls back to look at him incredulously. “Yes? What else would that mean?”

“Uh,” Richie hedges, stalling out for a moment when Eddie squarely kisses the center of his bottom lip. “Should I brush my teeth?”

“No.” He doesn’t feel like wasting more time, and Eddie doesn’t taste like much except heat and warmth and saliva. He’s rapidly becoming accustomed to it, and it’s good because all of this is good, Eddie feels good.

They kiss more urgently here than outside, Richie apparently reading whatever he needs to out of Eddie’s body language, his pounding heart, his rushing breath. He lets Eddie turn him in place, almost like they’re slow-dancing. Eddie is careful not to step on his toes with his shoes—the shoes Richie bought for him. Richie’s at a slight lean and Eddie steers him backwards across the room, not thinking much except _I love you, I’m seduced, you win_.

Richie stops abruptly when he hits the desk and almost sits down on it, but that causes the computer to wobble loudly. Both he and Eddie break apart at the same moment to watch and see if it’s going to capsize off the desk. As soon as Richie stands up again and takes his weight off the furniture it stabilizes. Eddie looks from the computer and back up at him. Richie’s mouth is twisted in a wobbly grin, and they blink at each other before they just break out laughing.

Eddie lets his head fall against Richie’s collarbone and Richie wraps his arms high around Eddie’s shoulders and neck, holding him there.

“Good date?” he asks. His voice is lower than normal.

Eddie loves how he sounds when they’ve been kissing. “Yeah,” he admits, mostly into the buttons of Richie’s new shirt. It still smells mostly of the store and whatever finish they put on their clothes. He pushes his nose into the vee of the open collar, nudging the first empty buttonhole out of the way, and comes to rest in the hollow of Richie’s clavicle. He brushes back and forth across the faint strands of hair there. Richie shivers a little.

“Thai food?” he asks, less a question and more a whole concept.

“Thai food is good,” Eddie agrees.

Richie’s fingers stroke through his hair. “Should we do this again sometime?”

He laughs down into Richie’s chest. “God, you’re so fucking corny.”

“Mmm, I think you’re into it.”

Eddie takes his hand off Richie’s arm and grabs hold of Richie’s side again. He’s soft there, in the space between ribcage and pelvis; softer still just over his hips. Eddie likes the faint resistance of fat as he pushes against it, as he squeezes. He hums a little in pleasure just to feel it. It’s not a denial.

“Know what you want to do next time?” They’re so close that his voice vibrates through his chest and into Eddie’s. Eddie’s careful of his incision but the heat feels good, feels soothing. “What other stuff have you always wanted to do?”

Eddie’s body lights up from low, low in his gut. It’s not what Richie means—he means bigger things, more abstract things, like all of Thai cuisine, things Eddie’s always had available to him but never really explored—but it’s impossible not to think about how close they are, how warm Eddie feels, full and happy and heavy and satisfied and with more in front of him if he wants it.

Which is not even in question.

“Can we sit down?” he asks. His feet ache a little from standing all day.

Richie shifts, straightening up a little, arms unfolding from around Eddie’s neck and shoulders. “Uh, sure, do you want—should we—couch?”

The couch feels very far away. Unseeing, Eddie reaches out, misses, and flails a bit with his left hand until he gets hold of the desk chair. He rotates it without looking, hoping that it’s turned towards Richie, and pushes gently with his other hand on Richie’s shoulder.

“Or—okay,” Richie says, and sits down heavily. Eddie’s entire torso suddenly throbs in the absence of his body heat. “Do you—?”

Blinking, Eddie considers the stability of the chair. It’s very close to the desk, and as long as they don’t take out the computer, everything should be fine. The chair is generously sized, more generously than a desk chair needs to be. There’s room on either side of Richie’s thighs. He puts his hands on Richie’s shoulders.

“Oh fuck,” Richie says as he catches on. His knees come together, making more room, and he reaches out for Eddie’s hips. Eddie feels faintly pleased by his cooperation as he climbs on top of him. There’s a moment where they have to find their center of gravity and Richie’s palm presses flat to the top of Eddie’s tailbone. “Gotcha, gotcha.”

Being on Richie presents him with an interesting height difference. His knees slide into place on either side of Richie’s hips without feeling even a little unsteady. He cups his hands around Richie’s jaw and feels how hot his neck is against his cold fingers. Eddie kisses him again, stroking the stubble with his thumbs. Richie leans back in the chair with a great air of surrender, of _I’ll let you do whatever you want, Eddie_. It makes Eddie’s skin buzz.

“You sure you don’t want the couch?” Richie sounds dazed, but that could just be from how closely crushed the words are between their faces. Eddie imagines it for a second: Richie spread all the way out underneath him, stupidly long and wide. He kisses Richie a little harder, their lower lips compressed between their teeth. Richie sighs, “Okay,” in a voice so low it seems to come straight from his toes.

He’s careful about Eddie’s chest and back. Eddie feels a passing flicker of irritation—not at Richie, but at the fact that the world isn’t exactly the way he wants it—before it evaporates. Richie strokes fingers down through the hair at the nape of Eddie’s neck, over the knob at the top of his spine. His other hand climbs between Eddie’s shirt and sweatshirt, knuckles digging into the flat of his back.

It occurs to him that Richie’s sort of trapped here in the chair under him, and that makes him flush so hot he has to pull back. “Are you—good?” he asks.

Up this close he can see the difference between Richie’s iris and pupil, the brown so deep it looks black, constricting and then bleeding back and then constricting again. “Yeah,” Richie says, more air than voice. “What do you—do you just want this, or?”

Richie knows his limitations, so that’s not what he means. Eddie sees that flash again in his mind’s eye of Richie sprawled out on the couch, Eddie pressed against him from lips to toes, how good that would be. How fucking intense. He swallows and Richie’s eyes flick downward to follow the bob of his Adam’s apple. Eddie feels hot and there’s a faint tingling in his extremities and in the pit of his stomach, and he should stop, but now that he sees what—what kissing, what intimacy can feel like, he understands why it’s so hard to stop.

What does he want? His stomach gives a tight flip, but instead of apprehension or anxiety, it’s a little bit of a thrill.

He swallows. His mouth feels very dry all of a sudden. The height difference is good, it makes certain things convenient, puts ideas in his head. He reaches up to Richie’s hand in his hair and guides It to the side, so his fingers smooth across his neck. “Can you kiss me here?”

Richie’s irises _twist_ as his pupils swell. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, just…”

He leans up a little, and Eddie leans down so his chin is almost touching Richie’s shoulder, his cheek very close to Richie’s neck in turn. He’s aware of the hunch of his shoulders, how much more comfortable it was when they were chest to chest. Then Richie turns his head so he can rub his jaw across Eddie’s skin, so Eddie can feel the bristle of his stubble, and Eddie stops thinking about his discomforts.

Richie probes behind his ear with the point of his nose, seeking soft spots. “Where? Here?” His voice is soft. His breath is a physical touch.

Eddie swallows again and closes his eyes, his brow scrunching up as he fights his own embarrassment to ask for what he wants. “Lower?”

Richie traces a line along the muscle. Gently, gently, he puts the softest kiss on the skin there. He’s so careful that if it weren’t for the faint wetness inside his lips Eddie might not even feel it.

“Here?” The word itself is as hot as his breath.

 _Oh my god,_ Eddie thinks in something like astonishment. _I should be getting hard_. He knows what that heat means, knows what the heavy pooling of blood towards his thighs and dick means. It’s never happened from kissing before. Eddie just always thought it took a lot to work him up, to get him interested. He’s never been _teased_ before Richie. He takes deep breaths, wondering if he’s going to actually get hard for the first time since his surgery. Richie’s turning him on.

He takes Eddie’s silence and ragged breathing as reason to keep going, mouthing gently at his neck, sliding half an inch lower so that Eddie can feel his stubble drag and scratch.

“Like that?” he asks, voice still very soft and almost gentle.

Eddie swallows. It’s—it’s good, he likes it, but there’s still a humming tension in his gut, and his brain keeps helpfully tossing out sense memories—Richie biting his lip, Richie sucking his tongue into his mouth hard enough that it hurts. A list of overwhelming suggestions on his phone and the word _hickeys_ jumping out at him.

No one’s going to see. It’s just him and Richie.

He takes a deep breath and says, almost directly into Richie’s ear, “Can you leave a mark?”

He feels Richie’s breath shake as he inhales. “Yeah,” he says, voice tight. “Yeah, I can do that. Where…” He thumbs down Eddie’s neck; it’s a firmer touch than his nose or lips, and Eddie shivers, feeling it deeper in his skin. “Where do you want it?”

“Uh,” Eddie whispers. Richie repeats the stroke downwards from Eddie’s pulse point, slower. Parts of his skin seem to cry out for touch, for that scrape of stubble. “There,” he says. Richie’s thumb comes to a stop. “Right there,” he repeats, and then cringes, glad Richie can’t see his face.

Richie holds his thumb there for a moment and then taps lightly at the skin. By then Eddie is so sensitive that he startles a little and has to take tighter hold of Richie’s shoulders. The new shirt is wrinkling in his fingers. Richie fits his mouth against his thumb, keeping his place like tucking a finger between the pages of a book, before pulling his hand away and kissing him there. He’s still gentle.

Eddie’s breathing feels unforgivably loud. He’s practically panting into Richie’s ear.

“Okay,” Richie says.

It takes Eddie a long moment to realize, from his almost complete failure to intonate, that that was supposed to be a question: _Okay?_

“Yeah,” he replies, squeezing Richie’s shoulders harder, impatience floating just beneath the surface. “I’m fine, can you just—?”

Richie nips at his throat with his teeth and Eddie’s whole body jerks, half a whine coming out of his throat before he can stop himself. Through his nose Richie lets out a long slow breath that seems to billow across Eddie’s skin. Then he applies his mouth to Eddie’s throat and begins to suck. He pulls gently, in little pulses that Eddie’s spine thrills to, a rhythm that builds him up. Eddie feels prickling all along his back and thinks _shit, I’m not supposed to sweat_ , but then Richie sucks a little harder, pulling Eddie’s skin against his teeth, and Eddie thinks, _I can have a little more, just a little more_.

But Richie’s pressure remains blunt, almost gentle, and then he pulls off with a wet sound and asks, “Like that?” Not _do you like that,_ Eddie thinks it’s perfectly clear that he likes it, but asking for direction: _is that how you want it?_

And Eddie loves him, and he knows that they’re getting carried away and they should stop, that this has been a fucking resounding triumph of a first date and this is the cherry on top, but. He wants more. Just a little bit more. Just something to tide him over until—until they can do this again. For the night, maybe. Before he has to be the responsible one and walk away.

“A little harder?” he asks. His voice sounds too high and too loud.

Richie makes a low sound and then flattens his palm to the other side of Eddie’s neck. Eddie feels _pinned_ in place, almost, held tight. And then Richie _bites him_.

It’s exactly what Eddie wants—real teeth without caution—and the pleasure is so sharp he gasps, and now that Richie has his teeth in him he sucks harder. Eddie can feel himself bruising, feels it hurt but in a way that seems to radiate out from the hot wet circle of Richie’s mouth and prickle all the way down his spine.

Three things happen in quick succession that neither of them are prepared for: first, without Eddie’s permission, the word _“Rich”_ pushes its way out of his mouth; second, Richie makes an almost _growling_ sound and grabs Eddie by the ass, muscling him in close into Richie’s lap so he’s sitting with his thighs spread, pressed _tight_ between Richie’s strong arm at his back and their bellies crushed together; and third, a long, high, _loud, needy_ sound flies out of Eddie and into the open room.

Richie jerks back immediately, embracing arm seeming to vanish and his mouth separating from Eddie’s throat with a loud wet sound. “Shit, are you okay?” he asks. Then he blinks and gets an eyeful of exactly how okay Eddie is.

Face burning, still panting, Eddie stares down at him. His dick is still soft and indifferent, but he feels unbelievably hot, and his fingers don’t want to loosen from Richie’s shoulders, and he feels so good it’s _nonsensical_ , it _does not make sense_. And Richie—underneath him, pupils blown, mouth red, hair wild—stares up at him with an expression of such naked awe that Eddie _probably_ wouldn’t need to feel his hard dick poking into his ass to tell exactly how aroused Richie is. But it’s there, helpfully pointing out the obvious. Richie is on the same page as Eddie. Richie doesn’t mind that Eddie just moaned so loud that his ears and throat are still stinging from it. Richie _likes_ it.

 _I could have him_ , Eddie thinks suddenly and clearly, and then his thoughts splinter. _I could—he’d let me—he’d—_ He’s very aware of his hands on Richie’s shoulders, the leverage he could have if he chose to use it. Suddenly the no-sex rule seems like a failure of imagination: there’s no ban on _Richie_ sweating, on _Richie_ getting off, on _Richie_ grabbing hold of Eddie’s thighs and rocking up into him in this desk chair. And Eddie could wipe hair and sweat out of his eyes and kiss his shiny red mouth and _see_ —

“All right, I’m calling it,” Richie says, his voice all gravel.

For a moment Eddie can’t get past his own glazed imaginings to comprehend what he means. Then the rest of the house crashes back into focus around him. The desk and chair are like an island in the middle of this subsectioned room. The massive portals might as well not even be there, just portals to the yawning darkness outside. There’s a _fucking giraffe_ lying on the carpet.

Still on top of Richie, Eddie feels suddenly cold and bereft and exposed.

“It’s late.” Richie kisses his lips very gently, sweetly, without even a hint of tongue. It feels like an apology. “I’m going to bed.”

 _That’s not what you’re going to do,_ Eddie thinks with the irritation of a man who can’t get an erection. He tries to keep his resentment off his face and—clumsily, woodenly—clambers backwards off of Richie to stand on the rug. He is aware of his plain hoodie, his sneakers, his general air of _incompleteness_.

Ricihe reaches up and holds Eddie’s jaw between his thumbs to kiss him again, as he stands back and wheels the chair backwards. Eddie kisses him back as he goes from reaching towards Eddie to suddenly looming over him once again. He gets Richie’s lower lip between his own, trying to feel like an adult making a responsible choice and less like a child being sent to bed early.

“I left your—” The cling of their lips is almost sticky. “—your jacket, it’s—in the bathroom.”

“Okay. Thanks,” Richie says. He breathes in through his nose and takes a step back. “You all right?”

“Fine,” Eddie says. His lips throb. So does the spot on his neck.

“Okay,” Richie says, taking another step back. “And I’ll—see you in the morning?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay.” He draws in another deep breath and then stands straighter, turns, and walks away. “Good night.” He’s tall and dark and too big for the room. Eddie watches the spread of his shoulders as he goes, how wrinkled his new shirt is.

Stung, he throws at his back, “You aren’t subtle!”

Richie pauses for a moment, seeming to sway backwards in Eddie’s direction. Without turning around he tosses back, “Oh my god, if you want subtle go hit up—I don’t know, _Ben_. Catch me after your sex ban.” He throws up both hands and walks away.

Despite himself, that manages to drag a laugh out of Eddie, and that does feel like a balm.

* * *

He has stress dreams. Or maybe not stress dreams, just the repetitive style of dream that he’s always associated with stress until now. He dreams he’s climbing the stairs to the house over and over again. Sometimes the railing isn’t there and he _slips_ to the side the way you do in dreams, gravity slowing to embrace the full horror of free fall, and Richie rushes to catch him. He dreams he’s kissing Richie by the front door, and he can’t feel it the way he does in real life, but it makes his mouth ache with want and tenderness.

Then he’s climbing the stairs again. Then Richie opens the front door. Then he watches himself climb up the stairs and has to follow himself. Then he and Richie kiss outside the front door—then in the chair, and Richie holds him with his jaw between his thumbs and says, “Honey, no.”

Then Eddie watches himself walk up the stairs again and he has to follow, and he slips and falls through the railing, and Richie doesn’t catch him. Then he stands on the porch outside the front door again, talking to himself as he fumbles for keys to open the front door. Then he watches himself fall off the stairs and he reaches out and grabs for his own loose arm and—misses, and there he goes, tumbling into space.

“It’s not fair,” says the other Eddie.

Eddie jerks in surprise to find he’s dreaming of his guest room in Ben’s house. The whole room is drawn in shades of white and gray, and the other Eddie stands beside his bed. Instead of appearing naked, or in that strange bodiless way of dreams, he wears a suit that Eddie recognizes dimly as _work_ clothes. He looks smaller somehow. Almost pathetic, in the way his slicked-back hair seems to be sliding out of place, like he’s been rained on.

“What isn’t fair?” he mumbles. The words don’t want to form.

“It’s not _fair_ ,” the other Eddie repeats.

Then Eddie walks up the stairs to the front door again, and Richie says, “Whoops!” as he falls, and then, “Gotcha, gotcha,” as he catches Eddie by the wrist and drags him back up and into a kiss.

“It’s not fair,” says the other Eddie.

Eddie reels again. He’s no longer kissing Richie but is flat on his back in his bedroom, listening to his other self whine. It’s a deeply unpleasant change.

“What’s not fair?” he asks, his patience thinning. He thinks he might be grasping a level of lucidity that would let him call Richie back. If this is a dream there’s no harm in—well, whatever he feels like dreaming about doing with Richie. He doesn’t want to have to comfort a sulky businessman. In his dream there’s no reason for him to have injuries. In a dream there’s no reason for Richie to suddenly get _responsible_ and stop.

“It’s not _fair_ ,” the other Eddie says again, and before Eddie can lose his temper he adds, “You’re not alone.”

Eddie feels oddly defiant—didn’t he just reach out to try to save this Eddie from falling? And this isn’t—he understands, in that knowing way of dreams—that this isn’t the Eddie who emerged from the monster of his childhood, who peeled off his skin in a hotel room while Richie was on the phone through the door—except in the way that Eddie himself has for so long been that monster, the monster that grew out of his childhood, that he hated and feared.

This is the Eddie of a month ago. The Eddie who got up in the morning and showered and brushed his teeth and dressed for work and kissed his wife goodbye and parked his car and rode up in the elevator with others and said good morning to people on his way to his cubicle and did his work and sent his emails and never touched another human soul no matter what he did or said. And then he drove home and no music he played or podcasts he listened to ever really scratched that itch deep in his heart, and Myra had dinner on the table, and they ate without really knowing what to say to each other, because there was nothing to say, because Myra never volunteered random bits of music theory or asked Eddie absurd questions. And Myra had an idea about what they should watch on TV in the evenings and Eddie went along with that, and sometimes he thought about that old disproven theory from the nineties, that humans only use five percent of their brain cells, and he wondered how they had discovered that it was untrue, because he felt dimly aware that there was more—more of _him_ , more of _life—_ than he could access. And then he went to bed and pretended to fall asleep first thing, despite the chirping of the crickets in the roof of their building or on the neighboring balcony or in the gutters or _wherever_ they were, and he wanted… He wanted to feel something. He wanted to want. He didn’t know how. The mechanism atrophied from lack of use and he couldn’t remember how to make it strong again.

“You’re not alone,” Eddie tells the other him, fiercely, almost angrily, the words coming easier as they pour directly out of his brain. “You just have to do something. That’s all you have to do, you just have to do _something_ —if you want something, you just have to ask for it, that’s all you have to do, you can just change—”

The white bedroom melts into darkness around him, the comforting dark of the porch with the yellow light from the open door, and Eddie is looking at his own face, his own almost smug face, longing face, as he touches two fingers to his mouth and understands, and he leans in to kiss himself. Before they even touch he opens his mouth and the other Eddie—who is somehow also Richie, who is somehow also a nightmare—draws his chin up with cool deliberate fingers, cold fingers, and when their lips meet Eddie feels himself gasp—feels his sleeping chest suddenly convulse as he reaches for oxygen that he _cannot grasp_.

The dream—the Eddie, the Richie, whatever it is—draws from his lungs, sucks from him like a straw, like a hickey at his throat. No teeth, just taking what it needs. The mouth tastes metallic, but not like blood, not like copper or pennies or warmth, Eddie remembers what blood in his mouth tastes like and this isn’t it. It’s colder, it’s more like steel, he thinks, like the steel in his spine, in his voice, with which he once told his mother that he was fine in the hospital, that his friends were going to visit him, and that she needed to go home and leave him and his broken arm alone.

But Eddie’s not alone—he is with himself, he is beside himself, he has Richie, he has Bill and Stan and Ben and Beverly and Mike and Patty and he doesn’t think he’ll be alone ever again—he thought he was going to be married and die alone and he died and he wasn’t alone—Stan saying _I told you to apply pressure, numbnuts_ and Eddie gasping with his lung trying and failing to inflate, trying to tell Stan that it was okay, trying to tell Richie that he loves him.

His throat tightens—he can feel it, but it’s not that pinhole shrinking that he felt when he had an asthma attack—a _panic_ attack as a child, he remembers that; and it’s not an external choking pressure. It’s seeking something and not getting it, it’s needing something and being lost in the vacuum of that need, as the dream draws more out of him, more air from his lungs—precious air, but it’s all around him, he’s in Ben’s guest room, there’s air if he needs it. The dream draws hands down the muscles of his throat—Richie traces over the tendons, the line of his jugular—and all the way down and back to his shoulders, where they tremble and threaten to collapse. Eddie’s lungs _burn_ and the dream holds him tight. He’s awake and not, aware of his body and not, unable to handle this sensation, lost in the vacuum, the cold—

He feels himself cry out. The last of his air spills out of him and the dream—the other Eddie—Richie—the dream drinks it straight from his mouth, and there is no room in Eddie for air, so there’s room for _heat_ and _light_. He’s gone so long without having what he needs, he can last a little longer. The dream takes a tighter hold of him, drawing him down away from his body. Light goes straight through him. He is a vessel empty of air but this is what he contains—not an evil light, not a deadlight, but a _life_ light. Beside him—behind him—off in the distance the spider plant, made to exchange carbon dioxide for oxygen, made to join him in his recovery, blooms a sudden bright green-gold. Somewhere else Richie draws in a breath and lets it out in a sigh.

The dream shatters. Fragments burst past him as his eyes flies open, and he realizes that he is lying facedown in his pillow, and trembling, and absolutely _rock hard_. His hands shake as he pushes them up onto the mattress beside him and tries to steady himself.

He breathes in.

* * *

Okay.

So it turns out—and this should not be as surprising as it is, now that he thinks about it—that one of the consequences of a lifetime of anxiety about breathing and asphyxiating is—or _might_ be, really, this is one data point and not an established pattern, but—he _might_ be a little into choking.

That’s a whole issue that Eddie’ going to have to unpack with a therapist at a later date, because holy _hell_ he cannot deal with this right now. Wow. Honestly, wow. It’s just like his body to throw him this particular curveball. Whatever it means, the indignity is too great to suffer lying down. He actually flicks his dick in irritation, sort of wanting to punish it for responding to _whatever the fuck that was_ but not a hard and ready Richie under him just hours earlier. Of course, his dick just bobs in response and the shot of _oh yes_ he gets along with the sudden quick pain just makes him feel worse, emotionally. With a sigh he considers the pros and cons of a cold shower—it’s two-thirty in the morning, so talk about _subtle_ , Eddie has lost any high ground he might have had—and then he sighs again and puts on his pajama shirt.

He deserves a hot chocolate, after that.

No, that’s not right. Food has nothing to do with deserving. He’s _upset_ , but a hot chocolate might make him _feel better_.

And he’s an adult and no one can stop him.

So he dresses, tugs the generous softness of his pajama pants into place so that if Richie happens to be out in the kitchen or something his hard-on isn’t _immediately_ obvious, and pads out into the hallway. He can hear faint snoring from behind Richie’s closed door. Something twists in his chest and he snorts at himself for finding it endearing. Then he walks barefoot out into the kitchen. The tile is cold, compared to the carpet.

He turns on the light over the stove, fills the kettle, and flicks the lever to get it to heat. He knows that some people heat milk to make hot chocolate, and that sounds deliciously indulgent (not to mention a good way to get the calories the hospital prescribed him), but he doesn’t have the energy to fuck around in Ben’s kitchen with two-percent milk and a saucepan. He gets a mug down from the cabinet and carefully measures out scoops of powdered chocolate into it. At this step in the process he can actually see the tiny marshmallows; usually they melt in the hot water just like the rest of the mix.

He leans on the countertop and considers the stylish black stoneware mug. It occurs to him that it’s kind of boring, and that maybe it would please him more if it were a more vivid color, or if it had a different colorful finish on the inside, or even—hell, if it said _I survived another meeting that could have been an email_ , which Davis at work has and sometimes audaciously takes into all-staff meetings. If Eddie is struggling to gain a sense of self, of vibrancy, of individuality in his personal dress, it only makes sense that he should try to develop a taste in other aesthetics too. He doesn’t feel particular attachment to anything in the apartment he shared with Myra. At most, some of his work suits were very expensive and it cost even more to get them tailored. The actual décor he left to her. Once he frowned at a series of framed photos she asked him to hang—she made all the decisions, but wielding the hammer and nails was his job—and he asked if the arrangement seemed a bit small for the wall in question. Myra only laughed and asked him what men knew about decorating.

He wonders what Richie’s place in L.A. looks like. What kind of weird mugs he has. It’s Richie, he has to have weird mugs. What he puts on his walls. He’s sure there’s nothing too small for the wall there. He’s sure it’s all bursting at the seams with color.

He pours the hot water over the chocolate mix and sits at the island on one of the barstools, his elbows on the counter so he can lean over the mug and breathe in the smell of chocolate. By now he’s less egregiously hard. He feels almost human, and not like a creature made out of dread and want.

He strokes a fingertip over the bruise he can feel at his throat, but that’s not going to do anything to get his erection to go down. It feels too tender, too good. He feels too big for his own skin.

He’s sipping cautiously at his hot chocolate, trying not to burn his mouth, when he hears a door open down the hall. He sits, not moving, not slurping the foam off the top of his chocolate, just listening. He hears Richie walk down the hallway, and then the door to the bathroom closes.

He goes back to his hot chocolate. It’s kind of nice to be up late like this, with his hot drink and a comfortable exhaustion slowly relaxing into him, and know that Richie is in this space with him. The screens are pulled over all the windows, and he feels _contained_ and _safe_ and _comfortable_ somehow.

The toilet flushes, and the sink switches on, runs for a bit, and then switches off. The bathroom door opens again. Eddie wonders if Richie also feels sleepy and comfortable and is about to go back to bed, or if he woke up and isn’t ready to go back to sleep yet too.

Richie answers the question for him by wandering into the kitchen. He’s wearing the red and black plaid pajama pants and no expression at all, his eyes lowered. Eddie waits in the barstool to be noticed, but Richie doesn’t even look in his direction, instead going immediately to the cabinet with the mugs. In the warm dim light the hair on his shoulders and naked chest looks more like shadow, and there’s a softness to the shift of his stomach as he reaches up and takes a mug down, then turns his back to Eddie entirely to go to one of the other cabinets with food in it. Feeling like a wildlife documentarian, Eddie watches as Richie pulls out one of the seemingly infinite bags of Skittles, rips it open, tilts his head back, and pours half of the bag directly into his mouth.

Eddie’s lips twitch and he lowers his head a little. By now he knows it’s going to be startling when Richie actually notices him, and it’s impossible to hide properly behind his mug, but he sort of enjoys watching Richie in his natural habitat. This is Richie leading the unexamined life, and only Eddie gets to see it. He thinks a little bit, idly, about touching him; he had his hands there, on his love handles where he’s soft, and he knows what it feels like, but he wonders if Richie’s still sleep-warm or if the air on his exposed skin is cooling him.

Richie sets the half-full bag down on the counter, goes to pick up the mug, and then turns to the other side of the kitchen to the kettle. He’s completely oriented around that half of the kitchen; not once does he even turn in Eddie’s direction. Eddie watches his profile as he sees that there’s still water in the kettle, and his eyebrows lift a little as though in surprise, but otherwise his face remains almost completely expressionless as his jaw works at the mass of Skittles. Then his brow furrows and he places his palm on the side of the kettle. Eddie watches Richie process the data in real time, watches his chewing slow as he frowns—and then he turns and sees Eddie.

Eddie waves.

Richie’s eyes bulge and he immediately leans sideways over the sink. “Fuck!” he says, mouth full, but nothing scatters into the stainless steel of the sink. He chews his Skittles more aggressively and swallows, then says, “I coulda choked to death!”

“I didn’t realize you were here to just _gobble Skittles_ ,” Eddie says, because he thought of that, but didn’t really know what to do about it. “By the time I realized what you were up to it was too late.”

Richie spreads one big hand across his chest and massages at his sternum. Eddie lets his gaze drop to the hair there, to the way his nipples move slightly as he presses and pulls at his skin. Eddie never really clicked with how certain men went absolutely gaga over breasts, and he sort of always assumed pictures of shirtless men made him uncomfortable because of how unrealistically sculpted, how stylized they were. But actually, Eddie’s just extremely fucking gay. He would like to put his hand on Richie’s pectoral and _squeeze_.

Then he thinks _would you rather have eyes for nipples or nipples for eyes?_ and he almost laughs at himself, and his dick softens a little.

“How long you been up?” Richie asks, voice low and sleep-rough now instead of alarmed and indignant.

Eddie shrugs. “Two-thirty?”

Richie glances sideways to the clock on the stove, but Eddie can’t see it from his angle. One of Richie’s shoulders lifts in a gentle shrug. He reaches on top of the fridge—the redistribution of fat along his chest and stomach as he shifts is _fascinating_ —and he starts scooping pre-ground coffee into the French press.

“At two-thirty in the morning?” Eddie asks, skeptical and a little horrified.

“You know the caffeine thing?” Richie asks.

If by _the caffeine thing_ he means _is Eddie aware of the existence of caffeine_ , then yes, Eddie knows the caffeine thing. He nods.

“Works backwards on me.” He shrugs, both shoulders this time. “Kinda like sugar. Sugar’s different, though.”

Eddie frowns. “Then why do you drink coffee first thing in the morning when I’m running?”

He shrugs again. “Habit.”

Instinctive worry twigs in the back of Eddie’s mind—Richie’s teeth and the toll caffeine takes on his heart—but he’s able to quiet it. He sips his hot chocolate.

“Can’t sleep?” Richie asks, lifting the kettle.

Eddie sets his mug down and worries absently at his lower lip with his tongue. He looks down into the milky brown surface of the hot chocolate when he says, deliberately, “My bed’s cold.”

Abruptly Richie sets the kettle back down without pouring. Eddie doesn’t have the stomach to look up at him, instead picking up his spoon and stirring uselessly at his hot chocolate for something else to focus on.

“Uh, Eddie,” Richie says slowly.

“Mm-hmm.”

He pauses as though waiting to see if he’s going to man up and make eye contact, and then, when Eddie doesn’t, continues just as slowly, “So when you said you didn’t want to have sex…”

Eddie feels himself flush and he scowls down at his hot chocolate. “That’s not what I said,” he says, bristling. “I said I’m not _allowed_ to have sex.”

But he can sort of imagine it now—him lying very still, trying not to move, his chest heaving, while Richie with a tent of blankets over his broad shoulders kisses down from his navel. _That_ doesn’t help his persistent erection, and he scrunches up his face to try to fight it.

“Because I’m not allowed to sweat,” he adds.

He would absolutely sweat, if he and Richie did anything at all, and he has to remind himself _and_ his overactive imagination _and his dick_ that.

“Why wouldn’t I want to have sex?” he almost growls into his hot chocolate, stirring angrily.

Besides the big hole through his torso.

“Uh,” Richie says. “I don’t know, I thought it was like—when my mom offered you tea and you said _no thank you, I’m not allowed to have caffeine_. There’s caffeine in chocolate, by the way.”

This gets Eddie to jerk his gaze up to him in a glare. “I know.”

There’s a light flush from Richie’s throat down his chest, and _that’s_ interesting. Eddie tries to focus instead on the way Richie has both hands up in the universal symbol for _who nelly_.

“Anyway, sex is not tea,” Eddie grouses, hunching down on the counter.

“Thank you, I noticed that,” Richie says. He pours water into the French press. Eddie watches the level rise, watches the carafe suddenly fill with rich dark brown. Richie sets the kettle back on its unit and, with careful precise fingers, fits the lid to the press on.

“I’m going to want to have sex,” Eddie manages, talking more to Richie’s large and somehow elegant hands than to the man himself. It feels less mortifying. “Eventually. When I’m… medically allowed, I guess.” He swallows and quickly corrects, “If you want to have sex, I mean.”

Richie releases the French press, takes half a step back, and flattens himself to the countertop, his face down. There he groans.

Eddie thinks that might be encouraging, but he isn’t sure. He picks up his mug again and takes a sip.

“You’re killing me,” Richie says, muffled because one arm is folded over his head like he can shield himself from Eddie.

“Well, sorry, but how do you think I feel?” Then he remembers that little display with the shirt outside the Macy’s and says, “No, actually, fuck you, I’m not sorry.”

Richie’s shoulders hunch forward as he laughs quietly. Eddie stares at the drape of his hand as he relaxes, as he peels himself up off the counter. “Okay,” he says, voice less strained. “So what exactly are you asking for here? Use small words, I’m dumb.”

“You’re not dumb,” Eddie says immediately, but it is after two in the morning and he thinks that everyone is allowed to feel a little dumb right now. “I want you to sleep in my bed,” he says. “With me.”

“Good words,” Richie decides. “Just—sleep. Right?”

“Yes. Just sleep,” Eddie tells him and also his own dick.

Richie gives a short affirmative huff through his nose and carefully slides the metal tube down on the French press. Eddie watches the slow deliberate straining of the coffee grounds as the filter sinks all the way to the bottom. Richie gives one last push on it, pressing any remaining coffee out of the grounds, and then pours the coffee into the mug. The sudden smell in the open air seems vibrant and colorful and extremely Richie. Eddie has never really liked to hang around Starbucks, but now the _aroma_ of coffee has a certain appeal.

“Okay,” Richie says. He picks up the mug and asks casually, “What if I, like, roll on you and crush you to death?”

Eddie blinks once before realizing that this is fatalism and not a genuine offer that Richie is making him here, because the idea of Richie lying on top of him is _undeniably intriguing_ and _completely unrelated_ to his recent reaction to difficulty breathing. “Uh,” he says, trying to keep his imagination in line. He frowns a little before gesturing at his very three-dimensional body. It’s not like he’s a paper doll or something. “You can’t?”

“That’s not what I—” Richie rolls his eyes as though _Eddie_ is the one being unreasonable here. He gestures with his free hand at his own ribs. “What if I, like, touch your stitches and hurt you. Or, like. Accidentally squeeze you.”

Eddie thinks of the pillow he saw at the hotel in Bangor, crushed into a sort of bow-tie shape. Richie is a sleep hugger. Richie has always been a sleep hugger; Eddie remembers camping trips in Stan’s backyard, Richie folded up in his sleeping bag with one shoulder pressed hard into the nearest person’s back, his arms around his pillow, his head resting on the floor of the tent.

He wants Richie to hold him in his sleep.

“I’m not made of glass, Rich,” he says. “You _have_ touched my stitches.” Eddie leaned all along him, and the warmth of his body felt really good. “And I’m not gonna sleep through—” _through you breaking my ribs_ “—anything that actually hurts, I’ll wake up and tell you to move over if I have to.” He swallows again and then walks that back: “If you want to, you don’t have to—”

“Me wanting to is not the issue here,” Richie says just as quickly.

That’s… also sort of reassuring? It’s not the unambiguous _I want to_ Eddie wants to hear. Part of him is still jealous of Richie’s past partners, wondering if any of the men out in L.A. asked him to stay the night with them, to sleep over. About whether that’s why Richie’s so good at kicking breakfast, if it was a gracious gesture before kicking them out. If those were things Richie wanted, Eddie wants him to have had them; he doesn’t want Richie to have spent his adult life alone and sad and unwanted, but he sort of hopes not. He hopes that the invitation is one Richie entertains for him, but wouldn’t for anyone else. He wants Richie to be _his_ , wants sharing a bed to be significant for both of them.

It should be illegal to learn this much about himself after midnight.

“I want you to be—” Eddie gestures uselessly with his arms. “— _there_.”

 _When I sleep. When I wake up. When I have weird sleep paralysis dreams and get hard over objectively upsetting things_. He wants to be able to reach across the mattress and wrap his arms around Richie and hear him make sleepy sounds back at him. Wants Richie the way he gets him sometimes on the couch, wrapped around him like a blanket and humming, pleased.

“You’ve never hurt me on the couch,” he points out, feeling like this is a load-bearing piece of evidence. They have slept curled up together—or Eddie has, mostly, but Richie has nodded off a few times as well. This would just be… on a bed. On a mattress. With a lot more room.

Richie’s eyes are a little white around the edges when he looks at him over the mug of coffee.

“All right,” he says at last, looking not certain at all. “I can do that. Let me just—” He raises the mug slightly to indicate the things he still has to do, twists in place to gesture towards the open bag of Skittles behind him.

Eddie is just about done with his rapidly cooling hot chocolate, and he gets the sense that Richie needs to emotionally prepare or something. “Okay,” he says, and drains his mug.

Richie drinks from his coffee as well. It feels like sealing a pact.

“Do I need to—?” Richie begins, and then waves at his upper body. “—put on a shirt or anything? Because I.” He grimaces. “I can, I just, if sweat’s bad for you, I don’t want to sweat on you or be fucking gross, but like—” His free hand spasms open and closed again, before he balls it into a fist and jams it under his other arm. This pushes his bicep out.

Eddie looks at that and thinks of Richie casually saying _I sleep naked_. “No,” he says, his voice coming out like a creaking door. “You don’t have to—I’ll just—” He looks at his empty mug and slowly gets up, keeping the island between him and Richie because he’s still hard, definitely hard, and he’s second-guessing the wisdom of asking for what he wants right now. He points in the general direction of the bedroom. “—go… lie down, I guess.” He swallows. “If you need to, like. Yeah. Don’t be surprised if I’m already asleep when you. Uh.”

“Right,” Richie says. “Okay, I’ll be right in, I just.” He offers Eddie a strained sort of smile over the mug.

“Right,” Eddie agrees, and leaves his dirty mug on the counter, walking down the hallway as stiffly and clumsily as a marionette. He opens his door and leaves it open, then climbs into bed and pulls the blanket mostly off and out of the way, lying with his back to the door.

For a long while he thinks that Richie won’t actually do it, will suddenly say, _Hey, this was a bad idea_ from the doorway, and Eddie will be very understanding and try to pack his hurt feelings away and it won’t be Richie’s fault at all, it is probably a bad idea. He draws the sheet up to his chest and tucks it under his armpit and waits, and to his surprise he actually does drift off before he wakes to the feeling of the mattress dipping behind him.

Richie murmurs, “Sorry,” as he slides in on the other side of the bed, pulling the sheet up over himself.

“It’s okay,” Eddie whispers back, but he doesn’t necessarily feel okay until Richie is slowly, cautiously, guiding himself into place against Eddie’s spine. He’s so _warm_ through the material of Eddie’s pajama shirt, that Eddie immediately goes lax and pliant.

“Okay,” Richie says with a sense of eventuality. Eddie hears the pillow shift to the side, and then one arm wraps carefully around him, Richie’s elbow hooking over his hip and holding him tight. He inclines his head and pushes his face into the back of Eddie’s hair, just over the nape of his neck. “Is this okay?” he asks quietly, a little muffled.

“Mm-hmm,” Eddie says, awake on a live wire. Then he decides to be honest and mumbles, “It’s good,” and shuts his eyes. He tries to match his breathing to Richie’s, to just focus on being together like this with him.

He doesn’t notice when he slips back under.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The cow anecdote was told to me secondhand when I was living in farm country--if you remember early October of last year when I took a break from posting because I had to go on a road trip with my mother to buy a cow, the sellers of the cow are the ones who actually experienced the murderous herd. The husband is fine.
> 
> I'm also gonna go ahead and say that this chapter marks a distinct tone shift for the fic, for reasons you can probably guess. As always, you can find me on tumblr @tthael or on twitter @IfItHollers--or in the comments. Thank you for reading!


	21. Hurt Your Feelings

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Eddie has a nightmare. Then Richie exercises. Then Eddie exercises and relives a nightmare.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi! Sorry it's been a while, my whole life changed. Anyway!
> 
> Content warnings: Threat of home invasion, paranoia, some terror, trying to write a jump scare. Eddie has a mild panic attack with breathing anxiety and some hypochondria-related stress; the symptoms I used were those of physical shock, though he does not get injured. Mention of canonical bullying. I am not sponsored by Camelbak. Eddie has some pretty weird ideas about "deserving" and an adversarial relationship with his body. Fainting. Eddie's broken tooth. Irresponsible use of alcohol. Verbal fighting. Insensitive reference to parental abuse. Richie does something upsetting with his teeth. Reference to drug abuse and rehabilitation. Oblique reference to hate crimes and homophobic violence. Insensitive reference to death. Eddie has poor self-image. Leather, reference to animal death.

In the interest of complete honesty, Eddie never liked sharing a bed when he got married. He chalked this up to the discomfort of the adjustment, nothing against Myra. For most of his life, Eddie slept in a twin bed by himself, and he never worried about anything except his hands or feet dangling off the edges of the mattress, and any monsters that might be lurking underneath. So it made sense that, once he got a queen-size bed—all that space! What luxury! New and chiropractically interesting positions to sleep in!—a part of him resented having to share it. Eddie was always a little greedy deep down, at heart, so it made sense that he wanted _the most_ , and he didn’t want to share.

But marriage is compromise. Learning to share a bed with another person is difficult, but everyone makes sacrifices to make room for another person. When he asked Myra to marry him, Eddie committed to sharing a bed with her almost every night for the rest of their lives. And if, on those occasions where Eddie traveled for work or Myra went to visit her family and they slept apart for the night, Eddie was secretly grateful for all the space—well, it was a silver lining to being apart. Everyone felt like that. The exchange for the unpleasant break in the routine was the ability to stretch out on the bed, heedless of anything but his own comfort.

So Eddie slept easier without Myra, and when they did share a bed he kept himself to a rigid bedtime—a sleep schedule is important for overall health!—and he possessed his sleep in a way he possessed little else. Myra, whose schedule changed on a biweekly basis to match her shifts at the boutique, tended to be more indulgent with her bedtime, wanting Eddie to stay up to watch a good scene in a movie with her— _A Few Good Men! Come on, it’s the best part!_ —wanting Eddie to lie on the couch with her even though he was feeling tired, wanting other things. Eddie wouldn’t say he decided to fall asleep before she came to bed for any real _reason_ —but if he was still awake when she came in, he didn’t move. He kept his eyes shut. Half of falling asleep is pretending you’re already asleep, he excused himself. He was just trying to exercise good sleep hygiene.

All this is to say that Eddie has never before considered sleep to be a refuge. It was something to be stolen and protective of, and when the crickets moved into the building he was filled with incandescent rage that apparently touched something so deep in his soul the clown was able to use it to frighten him, four-hundred and fifty miles away from Myra and the threat of sharing a bed.

Once again, Richie is different. Richie insists on being different. Can’t help anything else.

He’s not soft. Or he is, he’s comfortable to lie against, but there’s substance to him. Eddie’s sleep has been stiff and painful while he recovers from his surgeries, only able to find a few comfortable positions, but with the bulwark of Richie’s body to brace himself on he’s able to lie at angles that don’t irritate any of his incisions. Richie is solid and safe to lean on, and whether it’s just the accumulation of bone and muscle and fat and body hair or something more intrinsic to Richie—Eddie is too comfortable and satisfied to care. Richie is warm and supportive, and Eddie lets the heat of his body soak through his pajama shirt and thinks, _Oh, this is how it’s supposed to be_.

He just thought he didn’t like cuddling.

Richie’s careful of his stitches, draping one arm over Eddie’s hipbone instead of over his tender torso. It’s heavy, but Eddie’s pelvis can take the weight the way that his broken ribs can’t. Richie’s breathing is loud but somehow numbing where it whooshes against the back of Eddie’s neck, and Eddie finds himself wanting to match it, wanting to be the same as Richie. It’s soothing.

He goes in and out of sleep. This isn’t surprising—he takes painkillers and sleeps a lot during the day, so he frequently sleeps for maybe three or four hours at a shot at any time of the clock. He’s pretty sure he read somewhere that humans are meant to have a bifurcated sleep pattern anyway—that before electronic timekeeping, humans slept when it was dark, and woke naturally in the middle of the night, and people took that time for themselves. They read by candlelight, or they sat on their porches, or they talked to their neighbors who had similar sleep schedules, or married couples had sex. Then they went back to sleep when they were tired.

Eddie wakes up to find it’s still dark out, and the room is comfortable and sweet around him. His mouth is dry and his heartbeat feels strong and heavy in his chest. Richie is still breathing, loud but shallow. At some point while they were sleeping Richie slid down the mattress. He’s hugging Eddie around the hips, head resting practically on Eddie’s ass.

Jesus fucking Christ. Sleep-hugging bastard.

Well, Eddie’s dehydrated. He moves slowly, levering an elbow under himself so that he can reach out to get his water bottle from his nightstand. He has to slide out of Richie’s arms to do it, and Richie makes a displeased noise in his sleep and wraps his arms more tightly around Eddie’s thighs.

“Come on, Rich,” Eddie mutters.

Richie snorts awake. It’s so similar to the impression of sleep he did in the Jade of the Orient that Eddie finds himself smiling. The mattress shifts as Richie adjusts, sitting up a little.

“Oh,” Richie mumbles. Then he pats Eddie, gently, on one butt cheek.

“Oh, for the love of—” Eddie growls.

He’s not delighted that Richie was using his ass as a pillow; his whole digestive system is such a quagmire right now that he’s almost certain he farted on Richie in his sleep, but he’d rather they both pretend it didn’t happen. Knowing Richie, he laughed about it and will tell Eddie all about it in the morning.

“Let me up, I need my water.”

Richie giggles a little, high-pitched and tired, and releases the arm on top so that Eddie can slide forward out of his grip. It ought to make Eddie feel trapped, but it doesn’t. He gets his knees under him so he can sit up, and when he unscrews the cap on the bottle he can feel the coolness of the water sloshing around inside the plastic.

His eyes have adjusted to the lack of light in his sleep. He can see the big shape of Richie’s body—now reclined on the mattress looking more indulgent than he has any right to—against the pale angles of the sheets. The electric blanket is almost entirely on Eddie’s side of the bed, shoved out of the way, and the comforter is half off the end of the mattress and hanging onto the floor. Over on the other side of the room, Eddie can’t see the dangling spears of the spider plant, but he knows it’s there.

Richie is half-naked. Eddie’s foot is pressed against the plaid flannel of his pajama pants—the fabric is soft and pilled, meaning he’s probably had them for a while. As Eddie drinks his water, Richie adjusts the top sheet, pulling it up over his thighs so it rests at his hips, but he makes no move to cover his bare chest. There’s a notable contrast between the places where he’s more thickly covered in hair and where he’s paler and more exposed.

“Y’okay?” Richie mumbles.

Eddie swallows and sucks at his own coated tongue. Either his mouth fell open while he was sleeping and he drooled—ugh—or the painkillers just have him dehydrated. He tries not to think about his sleep breath when he replies, “Yeah, just thirsty.”

Aside from that, he feels almost pleasant. It’s nice to be comfortable and lazy in bed with Richie, to know that he can go back to sleep when he chooses, or he can lie awake with Richie draped over him and enjoy it.

He drinks again, then screws the cap back on the bottle and sets it down on the nightstand. Then he rolls over, falling into Richie’s gravitational pull on the mattress. He feels for Richie with half-blind hands.

“Come here,” Eddie murmurs. He feels like he has to be quiet so as not to disturb the calm of this room.

“Hm?”

He finds the edge of Richie’s shoulder, the roundness where his ball-and-socket joint connects clavicle with humerus. He wraps his hand around it and feels how easily it fits into the well in the center of his palm.

“Up here. Get off my ass.”

Richie snorts. “I’m not on your ass.”

He moves slowly, either through lethargy or not wanting to shake Eddie off, which makes something possessive curl in Eddie’s stomach. He imagines Richie feeling as indulgent as he does, feeling every stretch of muscle as he lowers himself down onto his elbows and then onto his back.

“You were.”

“Yeah, well, can you blame me?”

Eddie smiles incredulously at this, though he knows Richie can’t see him. “Uh, yeah,” he says. “What are you, new? I can and I will.”

He pushes one hand across Richie’s chest—Richie shivers a little, like he also feels how his chest hair tickles Eddie’s palm—to make sure he’s lying flat, and then he lowers his head onto Richie’s chest.

Richie’s body is less thick here—broad as ever, but his real subcutaneous fat and muscle starts lower down. Eddie’s temple rests on the harder press of bone, but it’s somehow comfortable. The part of him that wants to occupy the exact same physical space as Richie is almost appeased by the idea that their skeletons are as close as they can get. Slowly Eddie tips forward, putting his weight at an angle so Richie supports it instead of his body having to hold itself up. He stops when he feels an ache from his chest incision and rotates back a few degrees, shifting closer, and then settles. This position pushes heat all along Eddie’s chest, easing sore muscles and injuries. There’s a faint discomfort from his incisions—he’s probably due for another dose of painkillers—but he can ignore it and focus on how comfortable the rest of him feels.

Richie’s breath blows across his forehead. His voice is very soft when he asks, “That okay?”

Eddie makes a vague affirmative grunt and pushes his face into Richie’s chest.

Richie startles a little, then relaxes. “Fucking bossy,” he says affectionately.

“Comfy,” Eddie replies. He’s aware that he’s smiling, and that if he wants to get back to sleep he’d better relax the muscles in his face, but he’s happy.

Slowly Richie bends one leg to rest the instep of his feet on Eddie’s calf. His toes are very cold—did he have them outside the blankets? Eddie frowns and closes his other leg around it to warm him up. Richie feels good to Eddie, so Eddie’s going to take care of him in turn.

He’s going to try to go back to sleep. But if he just lies awake like this for a while, that’ll be fine too.

* * *

He doesn’t dream about the other Eddie, the one out of his It horrors.

He doesn’t even dream about being impaled, but the dreams are definitely memories of Its lair. Everything is dark and sickly green, interspersed with flashes of white—corpsepaint, clown paint, deadlights, horror—and cast in the same frightening and unknowable confusion as the moment after Eddie really understood that something was wrong, that he hadn’t killed It, that his body was struggling to understand the violence done to it and his brain couldn’t keep up.

He dreams of shouting, of red balloons, red paint, red blood as it dripped upward out of Richie’s nose, of looking down at the fence post in his hand and thinking _nothing else will work, this is the only thing that might, and it kills monsters if you believe it does_.

He wakes violently but quietly, just as It screams and Richie falls to the ground.

He doesn’t know what time it is. Maybe dawn. There’s real light bleeding in from the closed blinds. The spider plant on the dresser looks pallid and threatening. Fucking _spider_ plant.

Underneath him, Richie slumbers on, oblivious to Eddie’s racing heart and gasping breaths.

Slowly, careful not to hurt himself, Eddie sits up. He feels Richie’s lower arm fall away from its curl around his back, but Richie doesn’t stir, gone curiously lax on the mattress. He looks like a broken toy, like something dropped from a height. Vulnerable, in need of protection.

Eddie tries to quiet himself, looking at Richie’s pale dreaming face. His heart rabbits. His shoulders rise and fall, his whole body moving with his breath.

He swallows. He feels almost nothing but his breath—no pain, no thirst, no exhaustion. He’s _listening_ —not for his own pounding pulse, not for Richie’s gentle snore, but for something _beyond_ the quiet shelter of this room.

There’s someone in the house. Something.

Eddie lurches to his feet. Prickles of pain radiate from his knees outward but he ignores them; he stumbles a little bit as he walks toward the door and has to remind himself to go slowly. He needs to be quiet.

He turns the door handle as carefully as he can and, once the tongue of the latch is clear of the frame, releases it and pushes on the wood of the door slowly. It glides open. Eddie doesn’t know if Ben just oils his door hinges frequently or if the house is new enough that everything is just in good condition. He’s grateful for it, though. It’s imperative that he doesn’t make any sound—that whatever is out there doesn’t know that he knows it’s there. That it doesn’t know he’s coming to find it.

He moves slowly. His bare feet are steadier on the carpet that way. He presses into his toes, into his heels; his knees no longer feel like he’s trying to balance on a pair of stilts. He is a steady column—head and heart and pelvis—and he can move himself as quietly as he needs to.

His instincts tell him to leave the door open, but looking at Richie asleep in bed—Eddie imagines wandering away from him and whatever else is in the house coming back this way, finding Richie unprotected. He grits his teeth and pulls the door closed as slowly and quietly as he can.

There’s more light in the hallway than he might otherwise have expected. Richie left the door to his room open, and the blinds as well, so Eddie can see out onto the dark lawn. There are no other cars pulled up to the driveway, no visible footprints on the grass, nobody else moving out there. Eddie rests his fingertips on the white-painted doorframe and breathes as quietly as he can, listening. He’s not sure for what. A voice? Breathing? Footsteps?

There’s nothing. Either it’s not here—in this room with Richie’s abandoned unmade bed and closed closet door—or it’s hiding well enough that it’s beyond Eddie’s ability to perceive it.

Remembering the encounter in the pharmacy basement—the most recent one, the body lunging at him over the scattered needles—Eddie takes a deep breath. His nose whistles a little; his ribcage expands; he feels a stretch in all four sides of his torso, an ache in his incisions, and then the discomfort fades. Then he turns, bracing himself for the attack.

Nothing. There is nothing there. It’s him, in this empty hallway. Just one of him.

He left the door to Ben’s master bedroom closed, though he’s been going in and out of it every day to borrow shorts and sweatshirts for running and then to return clean laundry to the drawers. He opens the door just as carefully as he did the door to his guest room, just as slowly. If something’s inside it’ll no doubt see the handle turning, but he stands with his back to the door as he opens it slowly, creating a barrier between himself and anything beyond that, until it swings wide enough for him to see inside.

Nothing. It’s an empty bedroom. The bed is made; Ben even put clean sheets on it before he and Beverly left.

Eddie stares at it, feeling like he’s both here and not here—back in his house in New York, staring at his own made bed that he shares with Myra.

Shared.

Just—a place where no one lives.

There’s a cracking sound from the master bathroom. Nothing abnormal—he’s heard that sound before when he’s getting changed to go running in the morning, and he’s never thought twice about it. It’s the sound of tile, the sound of a house settling, just the ambient noise of a building expanding and contracting with the weather.

Unless that’s not it. His head is full of the crack as a claw collides with stone and scatters dust and fragments of rock to a cave floor. His ears ring with the memory of the sound Richie’s bones made when they hit the earth.

He crosses the room carefully, placing each step as close as he can to the wall, where the support is strongest and his weight is least likely to creak on floorboards. He can feel something sharp—it might be where the carpet is stapled into place.

The bathroom door is open. The light is off. There’s no window in here, so Eddie carefully braces himself on the doorframe and leans in to look into the room.

There’s movement, and his heart leaps in fear—but it’s his own reflection in the mirror. He stops and his reflection stops too. It’s identical to him—no trauma-induced trickery here, just light against glass. His reflection looks as wide-eyed and panicky as he does. There’s nothing else in here—no figures in the corners, nobody standing, threatening, in the shower, no one revealed as he slowly leans around the doorway.

He takes another few deep breaths, trying to figure out how he knows they’re not alone in this house. His brain doesn’t want to process that—he’s racing full of adrenaline, his body telling him, _Don’t worry about the why or the how, just worry about getting out of this alive. Just worry about you and Richie, getting out of this alive._

He moves quietly out of Ben’s master suite, keeping his feet close to perimeter of the room, his hands bracing himself on the walls as needed. He doesn’t bother closing the door this time—nothing in there to protect—but heads down the hallway towards the bathroom. Sometimes this room makes the same creaking noises as the other bathroom—which is part of why Eddie’s convinced it has something to do with the echoey nature of the tile, the way that sounds aren’t softened by carpet and bedding and other soft surfaces.

One of the taps gently drips. Eddie walks over to the sink, stares at the dial for the faucet, looking for wet fingerprints, evidence that someone has used it more recently than he or Richie could have. But there’s nothing. Eddie closes his eyes, reaches out, and tightens the tap, then moves on. Whatever it is, the threat is not in this room.

He walks out to the living room. The panel blinds are still up; faint dawn light turns the white walls pale gray, keeping most of the house dark and cavelike. The advantage of Ben’s hypermodern glass house is that Eddie can basically see straight from one side of it to the other, barring the dividing walls. He sees no movement, nothing and nobody quickly whisking behind a corner.

He turns to walk down the pseudo-hallway, to check every small room—living room, office, kitchen, dining area—in turn.

He collides with a massive body.

“Fuck!” Eddie gasps, his left arm coming up swinging, elbow and forearm pushing out and upward at throat level.

Richie catches him by the wrist, screaming back, “Shit!” on apparent instinct.

They stand there staring at each other, breathing loud in the quiet dark room. Then Eddie’s spine relaxes, pitching him forward into Richie’s shoulder, unable to hold himself up. He drops his gaze, terrified, his breath shortening into pants, his throat and chest _constricting_.

“Shit,” Richie repeats, quieter, but it’s too late now. If there’s something or someone in the house with them, it knows they’re up, and it knows where they are.

Finally, finally, Eddie identifies the feeling that has been lying in wait for him within his own body. It’s fear. True fear, evolutionary fear, the fear that wants to keep him alive. And he can’t even speak, can’t draw a full breath.

“Hey,” Richie says. “Hey, hey.” He drops Eddie’s wrist and takes hold of his shoulders on either side of his upper arm, trying to get Eddie to look up at him. Eddie barely has the strength to lift his head, the dread is so heavy in his body. “What’s happening? Eds, come on, talk to me.”

Eddie draws in a panting breath and says, “There’s—” And his throat closes entirely, choking the words before he can get them out. He swallows and tries again. “—something in the house.” He sways in place, Richie keeping him standing at the shoulders, all his confidence and stability, the steel in his spine, gone.

Richie’s wearing his glasses; Eddie can see his eyes sharpen behind them. He doesn’t ask questions, he just lowers his voice and says, “Okay.”

The relief that rolls through Eddie is premature—it has nothing to do with their actual situation. He reaches up and hangs onto Richie’s wrists, trying to contribute to supporting his own weight.

“So let’s leave the house,” Richie says.

This sounds reasonable. Eddie’s so grateful that Richie _believes him_ , is focusing on getting out of here instead of quibbling over whether or not Eddie is right, that he just nods weakly.

“Can you walk?”

Eddie nods. He takes a step forward, towards Richie, getting his feet under him again.

“Okay.” Richie puts pressure on his shoulders, a gentle push towards the door. “Go. I’ll get the keys.”

Fuck. Eddie doesn’t like the idea of Richie staying in the house any longer than they have to, doesn’t like the idea of separating because he knows what happens when they split up, but Eddie’s going to have to move slowly anyway. And Richie can’t wait for him to come with him, if he’s going to get the keys. Where are the keys, anyway?

“Okay,” Eddie whispers.

“Okay?” Richie repeats, and when Eddie nods he releases him.

Eddie stumbles forward, reaching for the banister on the stairs; Richie steps out of the way and moves deeper into the house, towards the kitchen. His long legs take long strides, loud steps; Richie is strong, Richie can run if he has to.

Eddie all but falls down the stairs, his weight on his hands on the safety rail instead of on his feet. He reaches the front door and turns the knob, trying to push it open as quickly as he can.

The door doesn’t open.

Eddie hesitates, checks the deadbolt. It’s locked. The knob and the deadbolt are locked.

He turns the dials and unlocks both, then pulls the inner door open and nearly falls through the screen door. Behind him he hears Richie’s steps, a faint jingle as he whisks the keys into his hand.

Richie catches up with him on the stairs outside, when he’s trying not to pitch headfirst down the wooden stairs to the ground. Richie jumped off this porch not so many days ago, but now he slows. “I’m right behind you,” he says.

“Car?”

“Yeah,” Richie says.

 _The door was locked_ , Eddie thinks, his stomach souring, but he moves barefoot down the wooden steps, onto the path to the gravel driveway. He picks across the small sharp stones and the Subaru beeps in front of him, lights flashing and doors clicking as Richie unlocks it. _The door was locked._

He wrenches open the passenger door and throws himself down into the seat, landing heavily. Richie does the same on the driver’s side and the weight of his body shifts the car; Richie slams the door shut behind him and looks at Eddie as Eddie reaches out with a numb and shaking hand to close his own door. Richie turns all the way around to peer into the empty backseat.

“Fuck,” Richie says, hitting the button to lock the doors again.

Eddie slumps back against his seat and tilts his head all the way back, feeling like he might faint. “I can’t breathe,” he gasps.

“Okay,” Richie says. “Are you—should I catch your head, or?”

Eddie shakes his head slowly, feeling foggy around the edges. His skin buzzes. His lips tingle. He actually might black out here. He reaches for the seat adjuster and tilts his chair back so he can rest instead of having to hold himself up. His breathing is loud and thin in the confined safe space of the car. “I can’t breathe,” he says again, more urgently.

“You are breathing,” Richie points out. “Like—like the thing about the Heimlich, you don’t do it on someone who’s coughing. You’re breathing fine, man, just catch up.”

“ _Fuck_ you,” Eddie spits back.

Richie gives a short laugh. “Come on, I’m in a two-ton weapon. Why the fuck didn’t we try hitting Pennywise with a car?”

The mental image is surprisingly vivid behind Eddie’s eyelids, which tells him that he’s closer to unconsciousness than he’d like to be. He opens his eyes wide to fight it and sees the wisps of smoke at the edges of his vision.

“Hey. Hey, Eddie.”

Eddie lets his head loll so he can see Richie.

“Go like this.” Richie makes his mouth into a tiny round O, like he’s drinking through a straw, and pulls air through it. Then he presses the back of his fist to his lips, holds it there for a few seconds, and drops it. It makes an audible sucking sound, like a using a vacuum extension.

What Eddie wants—what he _knows_ would work—is his inhaler. His garbage inhaler full of water and camphor flavoring, instead of steroids or bronchodilators. But he burned that in a ritual to try to kill a clown from outer space, and all he’s got is here in this car: Richie, and himself.

He presses his fist to his mouth, sucking like he’s pulling from the inhaler anyway. With the seal against his skin, nothing gets in. He holds that until he’s sure his diaphragm has stopped its panicky spasming, and then he pulls his hand away. The air rushes into his mouth, into his lungs, fills him up. His ribcage expands. His throat relaxes.

Eddie stares at Richie. He still wants to pant a little to catch his breath, but now that his lungs are full he tells himself to hold the breath, and then to let it out slowly. The whistle and whoosh from his nose is too loud in this quiet morning.

When he feels steadier, he asks, “Where the fuck did you learn that?”

Richie shrugs. “I took voice lessons.”

Eddie blinks, surprised enough that he shakes his head a little bit. “For what?”

“For public speaking?” Richie says, like it’s obvious. “Did it work?”

It makes sense to Eddie. He used to be comforted and reassured by the weight of the inhaler in his hand, but it was the act of dragging in air—dragging in _water_ , how the fuck did he avoid pneumonia during Maine winters?—that made him feel like the medicine was flowing into him, was solving the problem. He might not have the device anymore, but he can make himself breathe.

He settles back into the passenger seat, a little bit less limp now. He looks toward Ben’s big glass house, with its blinds pulled over the windows, and watches.

Nothing moves. Not even a shadow at the little edges where the blinds don’t quite cover all of the glass.

“What was it?” Richie asks.

Eddie sighs and admits, “The door was locked.”

In his peripheral vision he sees Richie’s head turn towards him, but he doesn’t look back at him.

“What?” Richie asks.

“The door was locked,” Eddie says. “I don’t know why—I just woke up and I knew there was someone in the house. I don’t know.”

Richie pauses. Then he says, “Do you want to call Ben?”

Eddie’s phone is still on the nightstand in the guest room. No, he doesn’t want to call Ben, to admit that he had a nightmare like a child and woke up in hysterics. He shakes his head.

“Come on, expensive as this house is, I’m sure he has a security system.”

“I don’t want to call Ben,” Eddie snaps. He closes his eyes, humiliated and angry at himself for being pissy with Richie.

But Richie, as ever, rises to the challenge, replying back in the same tense and angry voice, “Well, what do you want to do?”

He takes another deep breath, lets the anger pulse through him until it fades, and then he pushes both hands into his hair. “Sorry,” he says, trying to calm himself. “Sorry.” He swallows. “I—it must have been the drugs. I had… dreams when I was in the hospital. Flies landing on me, and… I thought I was trying to host Christmas, and I woke up talking. I don’t know.”

“There are other doors,” Richie says. “I can check the garage door, the back door, if that would make you feel better.”

“It wouldn’t,” Eddie says, and grimaces at himself, trying to keep his rising temper off of Richie. “There’s nothing wrong with the house. It’s just…” He closes his eyes again, fingers pushing through his hair, the heels of his hands flattening across his forehead. His extremities are very cold; his feet are bare and stinging from where he walked across the driveway. He doubts Richie stopped to put on shoes either. The sleeves of his pajama shirt brush against the insides of his forearms and make him shudder.

“Just what?” Richie asks.

“Just something wrong with me,” Eddie replies. “I think I have a fever.”

Richie is quiet for a moment. Then, in a calm voice, he says, “Look at me.”

He lowers his hands and turns to look at Richie, letting his defeat bleed into his posture in lieu of proper apology.

Richie tilts his head as he looks back at him. He doesn’t reach out to try to put his hand on Eddie’s forehead, no caretaking or patronizing gestures.

“If you have a fever,” Richie says, “what do we do?”

Eddie swallows, trying to think back to his discharge papers. “We’ll need to go to the hospital,” he admits quietly. “If it’s over a hundred and one.”

He’s already had one infection in his anterior incision, and they treated it, and he’s been on several antibiotics, which means that if he’s built up resistances it will be a pain for doctors new to his case to treat it. He’ll have to contact Sovereign Light Hospital in Bangor, and probably take his discharge paperwork with him to the ER, and explain what happened. And he’s—tired, now. Now that the adrenaline is draining from his system, leaving him trembly and cold.

“Okay,” Richie says.

He makes no effort to move. He doesn’t start the car, or put on his seatbelt. He just looks at Eddie.

Eddie takes a deep breath. Walking across that gravel is going to suck worse, now that he’s no longer riding an adrenaline high, he’s just full of dread. He reaches for the passenger door, feeling the ache in the incision from his chest tube as he stretches. He unlocks the door and then opens it.

“Let’s go,” he says.

* * *

Richie enters the house through the garage door while Eddie lumbers his way up the front steps to meet him at the open front door. Richie is strong, can walk easily, and once killed a trespasser in a public library with an axe. There is no reason for Eddie to be so nervous for Richie’s safety that he holds his own elbows like he’s trying to hug himself, waiting on the porch.

He kissed Richie right here less than twelve hours ago.

The sun is coming up. Everything seems less frightening in the daylight. One of the evolutionary fears of humans, Eddie thinks. It’s not that bad things never happened to him when the sun was out, but he questioned them more afterwards. It always felt natural that terrible things would happen in the dark, in caves, in the sewers, in basements; it was harder to believe that things happened on the street in full view of anyone who happened to look out their windows. Surely he had to be safer under someone’s watchful eye, right?

It asked him, when he was running from Neibolt house, _What are you looking for, Eddie?_ And then it said, _If you lived here, you would be home by now._

Whatever the fuck that meant. Like he was supposed to run home for safety? But safety had never been at home, it had been in numbers; it had been in riding his bike with Bill and Richie and Stan, and then with Mike and Ben and Bev; it had been out of the house and into the wild. Richie can take care of himself, but they can take care of each other, too.

Richie appears behind the open screen door and gives Eddie a thumbs up. Eddie nods and opens the door, steps into the house again, lets it swing shut behind him.

“Door was locked,” Richie reports. “By the way, Ben has a vanity plate that says _Ben’s Caddy_ , and I hate it.”

Eddie laughs. The bubbles of it hurt his chest. “I kind of love it.”

“Oh, you want _Eddie’s Caddy_?” Richie suggests. “ _Cadilleds?_ ”

“Absolutely fucking not,” Eddie replies.

They walk across the upper level of the house all the way to the dining room, where they can look out the back door onto the porch. It’s just as much a scaffolding in the back as in the front of the house; Eddie has gazed upon it occasionally when he does his daily laps around Ben’s property, but it’s less interesting than the multi-leveled monstrosity in the front.

Richie tries the door and finds the deadbolt locked there too.

“Gonna open the windows,” he says. “That cool?”

Eddie nods and sits down at the dining table, catching his breath. Richie goes to the office to get the remote, and Eddie watches the panel blind over the window in front of him retract, the mechanical grind as every glass pane in the house slowly unveils. The stronger light turns the inside of the house white. Every reflective surface shines.

“I didn’t see anything downstairs,” Richie says, visible from the office.

“I figured,” Eddie says, feeling stupid. Feeling childish. Feeling like the childish one in a room with _Richie Tozier_.

He grimaces again and pushes his hair off his forehead, surreptitiously feeling to see if his forehead is warm. He can’t tell. His hands are so cold.

“Can you get my thermometer out of my toiletry bag?” He doesn’t think he can stomach the walk back to the bathroom, or the bedroom, wherever the fuck he left it.

“Yeah,” Richie says.

As soon as he goes, Eddie regrets sending him off. He’s left alone in the house again, feeling somehow more vulnerable than he did when he was stumbling around like a paranoid survivalist, looking for home intruders. And to what end? What did he think he was going to do? He can’t even lift his arms over his head.

Richie comes back with the thermometer. It’s still in its plastic case.

“Did you—” Eddie begins, and then stops himself. He knows for a fact he washed it the last time he used it and dried it carefully before he put it back in its cover. He wants to roll his eyes at his own useless pedantry, but instead he just removes the case, hits the power button, and waits for the fluorescent green screen to blink _Lo_ at him. Then he tucks it under his tongue and waits.

Richie stares at him expectantly.

Eddie stares back, unwilling to open his mouth to speak, lest he compromise the ambient temperature of his mouth.

“I don’t know why, but I feel like I should do some sit-ups,” Richie says.

Eddie _loves_ Richie, but he is almost certain that Richie never does sit-ups and hasn’t since gym class in high school. He looks at him incredulously, trying to convey _What the fuck?_ with just his eyebrows.

Apparently either Richie gets the gist or Eddie is just predictable. “I know,” he replies. “I just feel like… an action sequence in a _Rocky_ movie. Like ‘Eye of the Tiger’ should be playing right now.”

Eddie wrinkles his nose. He actually doesn’t really like “Eye of the Tiger”; it was painfully overplayed when he was younger. Come to think of it, Richie was probably at least half of that, being as he was one of the great music curators of Eddie’s life. A lot of eighties and early nineties music gets Eddie to frown and turn the dial on the radio, or to put on a podcast instead. He doesn’t know if he was trying to avoid how those forgotten inaccessible memories made him feel, or if there was a sense of loss in their place. He can’t remember how he felt, and he can’t recreate it now that he knows.

The thermometer beeps. With trepidation, Eddie takes it out, turning the screen so that only he can see it, not Richie. He reads the numbers and blinks. Then he powers the thermometer off and turns it back on.

“I would watch you do sit-ups,” he says, and puts the thermometer back in his mouth.

Richie is giving him an incredulous look now. “What was it?” he asks.

Eddie shakes his head, gesturing at the thermometer in his closed mouth as a reason not to speak.

Richie just groans. “You’re a pain in the ass, Kaspbrak.”

Being deliberately frustrating, Eddie spreads both hands and shrugs, as though to say, _Medical emergency, nothing I can do_.

“Okay,” Richie says, and lowers himself to the floor. He winces and grunts as he goes; they’re extremely fucking middle aged. Sitting on his butt with his knees bent, he looks expectantly at Eddie.

Eddie raises his eyebrows at him.

“Come hold my feet,” Richie says.

Eddie rolls his eyes so aggressively that his mouth actually opens and the thermometer swings to the other side.

“Come on, I’m an entertainer,” Richie says. “It’s either this or I start singing, and I will sing all the guitar and drum parts of ‘Eye of the Tiger.’”

Despite himself, Eddie gets up from the chair and lowers himself to the ground. He crosses his legs under him and scoots carefully forward, resting his thighs on the tops of Richie’s bare feet. Richie, still sitting up, watches him come closer. Eddie puts his hands on Richie’s knees and looks at him expectantly. Richie sighs through his nose and leans back, lowering himself to the ground. He folds his hands behind his head, and Eddie’s eyes immediately go to his biceps, the tendons in his forearms, the clouds of hair in his armpits.

The thermometer beeps again.

“Hang on,” Eddie says, taking it out of his mouth. He checks the numbers, grimaces, powers the button off, and turns the thermometer back on. He waits for it to say _Lo_ and puts it back in his mouth again.

“Are you gonna count for me?” Richie asks.

Eddie shakes his head.

“I don’t think you’re invested in this at all.”

Eddie shrugs. It was Richie’s weird idea.

Richie breathes in loud through his nose, and on his exhale sits up, body folding easily, chest coming to his thighs. Eddie’s weight is actually insufficient to hold him in place, he’s so big; his feet lever Eddie’s body up and Eddie grabs tighter to his knees in alarm, pushing down with his legs to try to pin them to the floor. Richie seems to delight in looming forward at him like this, getting closer and closer like some demented jack-in-the-box; he gives him a crazy-eyed look and then pulls a face.

“One.”

He lowers himself back down, then up again. His bare chest brushes Eddie’s cold fingertips. He pauses there, leaning forward towards his knees. “Kiss me,” he says, and pulls the most ridiculous kissy face possible.

Eddie shakes his head. He knows for a fact they both have morning breath.

Richie pulls a dramatic pout, then leans forward even further and pecks Eddie on the nose. His jaw bounces off the end of the thermometer. Eddie recoils, wrinkling his nose, amused despite himself.

Richie makes it to five sit-ups before the thermometer beeps again. Eddie takes it out and checks it, then goes slack in place.

Richie rests his elbows on his knees. “What’s the verdict, Eds?”

Eddie swallows and shows him the screen, where it is showing, for the third time, the clear black ninety-eight point four on the shining green screen.

“I’m not sick,” Eddie says.

Richie grins, delighted. “You are below average!”

Eddie tucks the thermometer into his fist. “I’m—paranoid and drugged, but I’m not sick.”

“’Atta boy,” Richie says. He pulls the fish pucker again. “Kiss me. Celebrate.”

Neither of them has brushed their teeth. “Enjoy my germs,” Eddie says, and pecks his pursed lips in turn.

“They’re delicious,” Richie says, and then wraps his arms around himself and mimes frantic grotesque making out just like he did when he was thirteen, mouth wide open and tongue lolling.

* * *

There’s no point in going back to sleep, when Eddie’s alarm will be going off in less than forty minutes. It’ll take him longer than ten to fall back to sleep—he’s almost sure of it, anyway—and if he only gets half an hour, that’ll interrupt him in the middle of a REM cycle. He might as well get a headstart on the day and try to make up for the ridiculousness of the night.

Mankind was made to run from its problems. Eddie is going to hobble from them.

Richie leans over the countertop in the kitchen and stares longingly at the kettle as it begins to boil water for coffee.

If Richie looked at him with that expression, in his current state of undress, Eddie doesn’t know what he would do.

“I’m gonna go get dressed,” Eddie says.

“Can you bring me a shirt?” Richie asks. He turns to look over his shoulder, his expression softening. “This counter’s cold.”

“You don’t have to lay on it.”

“Nah, I wanna see if my nipples can cut granite.”

Every day, God tries Eddie.

He goes back to the guest room, retrieves his phone, and puts on a shirt; then goes to Ben’s master suite—the door still open—and hurriedly dresses in shorts and a sweatshirt. Then he decides he feels weird about rummaging through the basket of laundry he can see in the corner of Richie’s room—damn it, Richie—and instead goes to the Macy’s bag with the leather jacket and yesterday’s black t-shirt in it. He has to move slowly to bend to pick it up, and when he fishes the t-shirt out, he pauses.

It’s very still in this room. He looks from side to side, this time checking to see if the coast is clear.

Is he really going to—? Yes.

He quickly brings the bundle of black fabric to his nose and takes a deep sniff. It smells like soap and aftershave. He allows himself that much, and then he carries the shirt out to the kitchen and sets it on the countertop next to Richie, who is watching the kettle boil despite all idioms saying that it shouldn’t be possible. A watched pot never boils, and all that.

“Thanks,” Richie says, straightening up and reaching for the shirt.

Eddie turns away, because if he has to watch Richie put a shirt on with his hard nipples just _out there_ in the open air he thinks he’s going to lose his damn mind. Instead he starts opening cabinets, looking through them, and closing them.

“Ben’s kind of a jock now, right?” he asks, desperate to force a subject change.

He can hear the faint sound as Richie pulls the fabric over his head, and then Richie asks, “Like, emotionally, or physically?”

“Physically,” Eddie replies, though he’s not completely sure what the difference is.

Ben told them at the Jade of the Orient all about how he took up running in high school. Eddie… doesn’t envy Ben the kind of bullying he got when he moved away, he’ll never forgive any of those kids for it, much less that teacher, but he sort of wishes he’d taken up running at the same time. Wishes that he and Ben had been in the same town, and Eddie had had a reason to run after him— _you’re going to trip, your pants are too big, here_ , and maybe Ben could have showed him how to use an awl to put a hole in a leather belt. He wishes he’d been brave enough to have the fights with his mother that Ben had with his, and he wishes that Sonia could have been placated as easily as Arlene Hanscom was by a sudden influx of salads.

Either way, Ben was motivated by spite, and a fierce and vicious part of Eddie is proud of him for that. But he thinks it’s different from what he’s trying to achieve with his own body now. It’s already so weak and broken that trying to grind it into the ground won’t work. He’s trying to coax it into feeling like his own again.

So Ben is probably not emotionally a jock, anyway.

“Think he’s got a Camelbak?” he asks, opening cabinets again looking for water bottles. He could take a normal one, but this gives him something to do that isn’t watch Richie show off in front of him again, and it’s probably a little more environmentally responsible than the disposable water bottles they’ve been drinking out of the shrink-wrapped case Richie bought them in Bangor. Also they’re running low on those and they’re going to have to refill again shortly.

“Is that a euphemism?” Richie asks.

Eddie is so surprised by this response—though he doesn’t know why he bothers, nothing Richie says should surprise him anymore—that he turns in place to look at him. Richie is dressed again and doubled over on the counter again, leaning on his elbows. The position means that his nipples are, for better or worse, concealed from view. He’s also almost flat-backed; Eddie’s eyes trace the line of his spine to the curve of his tailbone, then down the drape of his flannel pajama pants to where one knee is flamingo-bent against the cabinet.

“Eddie,” Richie says. “My eyes are up here.” When Eddie’s gaze flicks immediately back to his face, he’s smirking.

“Shut up,” Eddie blurts back stupidly. He shakes his head, blinking. “What was the question?”

Richie waggles his eyebrows at him again. “Camelbak. Is that a euphemism?”

Eddie stares at him for long moments, slightly embarrassed to have been caught staring, before his brain makes the connection and he understands what Richie is talking about. Then he’s just disappointed in him.

“You are a gay man,” he points out. The second the words are out of his mouth he fears they were a misstep.

But Richie doesn’t flinch, just grins wider. “Yah-huh.”

Eddie draws in a slow breath through his nose, trying to emotionally steel himself before he guesses, “You’re thinking of cameltoe, aren’t you?”

“Oh, definitely.”

Eddie tries to think of a threat and blurts the first thing that comes to mind: “I’m gonna get into really good shape so that I can chase you around all the time hitting you with a spatula.”

“I saw that movie!” Richie says brightly. “It was hysterical. My agent would probably pay you for that. You’d become my official personal trainer.”

“Water bottles,” Eddie says. “Camelbak water bottles.”

Richie, disobligingly continuing to be big and tall, turns and starts opening up the overhead cabinets.

Ben does in fact have a Camelbak water bottle. He has several, each emblazoned with logos from various colleges and universities—far too many for Ben to actually be an alumnus from every single one of them. Eddie guesses that they’re projects he’s worked on, or places he’s visited. He fills one with cold water from the dispenser on the fridge and then bites down on the straw to drink from it. It makes his incisors ache, so he keeps the cold off his broken tooth, knowing that can’t end well.

Richie has apparently never seen a Camelbak before. “So it’s like a nipple,” he says slowly.

“What the fuck is it with you and nipples this morning?”

“Would you rather have nipples or cameltoes for eyes?”

“Your mother should have thrown you back,” Eddie says. “Like a catch and release fish.”

“Into what, _the uterus_?”

_“Yes.”_

Richie laughs so hard that he has to fold down onto the counter again. As the kettle clicks off, its work done, Eddie contemplates that he probably could actually call Maggie Tozier to berate her son. She’s enough like Richie, he remembers now, that she might even go along with the joke. It sounds extremely funny, but also like the kind of card he can only play once, so he resolves to hold it in reserve until a really good moment.

When he calms himself, Richie goes about the process of preparing the French press with the coffee grounds. Eddie finds that he enjoys watching Richie’s hands as they go about the mundane task, even without the influence of his painkillers. When Richie sets a measuring cup down, he opens his hand just slightly more than he needs to, like trying to emphasize the finality of having accomplished the motion. It’s not a deliberate flourish, it’s a remnant of the way Richie talks with his hands. Like he does what he has to, and then he tells himself, _Okay_.

“Why the cameltoe?” Richie asks without looking around at him.

Eddie is ostensibly completely ready to go for his run, but he’s still standing uselessly in the kitchen with his shins in the wind. “Huh?” he asks stupidly.

“Why the cameltoe?” Richie repeats.

“Oh.” Eddie looks back down at the green bottle with the blue rubber nozzle. “I’m dehydrated.”

His tongue still feels dry, and when he stuck it out while brushing his teeth in the bathroom mirror, he could see the scalloped impressions of his teeth on the sides. He read, once, that that’s a sign of dehydration. He pushed a thumb into his gum until it turned white and then counted the number of seconds it took to refill pink, and concluded that he needs to be drinking more water.

“I think between the Dramamine last night, and—” He gestures at Richie’s sheer bulk, indicating the heat that his body puts off merely by existing.

Richie, not seeing the movement but hearing Eddie’s silence, turns to look over his shoulder at him, eyebrows raised. “And?”

Eddie repeats the sweeping motion.

“And being hot and bothered?” Richie asks, grin appearing suddenly wolfish, his tone delighted and mocking in equal measure.

 _“GoodbyeRichieenjoyyourcoffee,”_ Eddie says, and storms as best he can out of the house, with Richie’s cackling smug laughter accompanying him. “Dumbass!” he shouts as the door swings behind him.

* * *

Objectively, it’s a bad run.

Eddie starts somewhat optimistically, fueled by general frustration at Richie—and it’s not mean or angry frustration, but almost habitual, his brain telling him that the safest response is falling back into faux-anger the way Richie will expect, because that’s what he does when Richie teases him, and that’s all Richie is doing. Just teasing. He doesn’t know how long he walked around this morning when he was moving slowly and convinced he was about to be physically assaulted, but he’s pretty sure that his heart rate was elevated enough for it to count as exercise, if they’re getting technical. If he knows that his body can support him in what he thought was a life-and-death situation, he ought to have greater faith in it in the mundane task of his daily half-hour of exercise.

And anyway, it’s not like he’s running in the first place, he’s walking. He just thinks he’d like to be the kind of person who runs every morning. He’s always wanted to be that kind of person, actually, and he thinks that if he’d been left to his own devices, he would have become that person far sooner.

Richie seems open to leaving Eddie to his own devices, or letting him do whatever he has to do. He trusts Eddie’s authority on his body and his injuries, and that’s what Eddie needs.

Eddie’s body has opinions about the excitement of the last twenty-four hours. His incisions are letting him know that he needs to take his painkillers soon—even though it’s not time yet, even though he’s up much earlier than he usually is. He was sort of hoping that structure was the scaffolding on which his body would support itself, but he went and upset the schedule by having paranoid nightmares and tearing around the house in the early morning. He supposes he deserves this discomfort.

His legs and lower back are also not happy with him, though that’s probably because he did far more standing yesterday than he has in weeks. There’s an ache in the soles of his feet; his knees are killing him; and his thighs and glutes feel tight and sore. When he stops to take a water break, he pushes the heel of his hand into the small of his back and it feels so good it sends a shock all the way down the lower half of his body, like all he needs is that little pressure to iron out everything going wrong with his spine.

He tries to take longer steps, to stretch out tight muscles. He tries to pronate onto his heel and roll forward onto the balls of his feet to engage his calves. He wishes he could run, certain that the long strides would make his legs and hips feel better. He’s so optimistic about stretching it out—walking it off—that he’d go so far as to say he has a little bit of a bounce in his step.

He’s out of breath by the end of the first lap around the house, when he passes back in front of the front porch to find Richie leaned forward on the patio furniture, coffee mug in hand, clearly doing his sports commentator Voice as Eddie drags his protesting body in a circuit around Ben’s property. Eddie can’t quite hear him, but Richie is clearly talking to himself, eyes fixed on Eddie, the corner of his mouth occasionally stretching into a lopsided smirk, like he just can’t help it. Eddie reaches out his arms to the side as far as he can get them and flips him twin birds, though the fingers of his right hand tremble as he folds them down. Richie’s mouth stretches into a grin and Eddie hears “—coming around the corner, he’s gaining on them!” from the stream of uninterrupted chatter.

He catches Richie talking to himself a lot. Sometimes it’s out loud, sometimes it’s silent the way it was in the hospital room back in Bangor. Sometimes Richie will say something and then lunge for his phone, muttering “Fuck, fuck, fuck,” as he opens up a note. Eddie’s not entirely sure how much of it is Richie’s job—he has ghost writers, but does that mean he doesn’t write any of his own material at all?—and how much of it is just Richie’s personality. He was constantly getting in trouble for muttering to himself in high school, teachers assuming that he was talking back under his breath—and sometimes he was, but sometimes he was talking himself through physics tests, or math proofs, and Eddie was both straining his ears and wanting to kick the back of his chair to shut him up and remove the temptation of cheating.

Richie chatters. Eddie sleeps, and walks, and takes pills, and does breathing exercises, and stretches in his room where Richie can’t see him.

It’s a bad walk. At the end of the first lap, his legs seem to give up on him entirely, like they can no longer be talked into propelling his stupid body around. Forget the easy carriage he thought he had this morning; he feels like a zombie, unable to even stop his toes from scraping on the ground. By the end of the second lap he almost gives up in disgust, but then he checks his timer and sees that he only has eight minutes left, so he staggers his way into a third before the alarm goes off, and then finishes his circuit around the house. He doesn’t bother looking up at what Richie’s doing when he ascends the stairs, just climbs with his head hanging.

“You wanna play chess?” Richie asks.

“No,” Eddie pants. He’s too out of breath for just walking. He thinks he learned somewhere that if you’re walking briskly, you should be able to talk at a normal speaking volume, but you shouldn’t be able to sing. And if you’re running properly and exerting yourself, you shouldn’t be able to talk in a normal speaking voice. He can’t remember where he heard or read it, but it sounds right.

He comes to a halt on the landing halfway up the porch, taking the moment to breathe. His body wants to hunch forward the way inexperienced runners do when trying to catch their breath, but Eddie is actually lucky that his abdominal stitches won’t allow him to bend that far forward. He has to bring his chest up, try to make as much space for his lungs to open as possible, ignore the stitch in his lower left side. He looks at where Richie is playing with the black chess pieces, twirling the queen through his fingers.

No. Richie’s smart. Eddie’s not going to play chess with him.

“You good?” Richie asks.

A little pulse of irritation goes through Eddie at the question. He’s _not_ good, he’s physically infirm and he had a nightmare so bad he dragged Richie out of bed and made him hide in the car from an imaginary intruder. The stairs hurt more than they did last night, and his breath is still coming out of him like a bellows as he tries to form a response.

“Tired,” he says shortly. He puts one hand to the bottom of his incision to brace his ribs, presses the other to the place the stitch is in his side. Normally he’d breathe through it until it eased, or until the little gas bubble in his chest popped, but his lungs have limited capacity now that makes him doubt the effectiveness of that.

Richie sets the chess piece down on the board, uncrossing his knees from their figure four so he can get up. He picks up his mug. Eddie is genuinely concerned about his teeth, with all the coffee he drinks. He wonders if this is a form of rebellion against Dr. Tozier.

“You want breakfast?” he asks, easily enough.

Eddie needs to take his painkillers. “Breakfast would be good,” he says. He wants hot water on his muscles, too, helping his body relax. “I’m gonna take a shower.”

It’s another deviation from their usual routine on this already exceptional morning.

Richie’s eyebrows lift gently but he only says, “Cool. What do you feel like eating?”

Eddie sighs, “I don’t know. Whatever you feel like making.” He shrugs as best as he can, sets his hand higher on the banister, and resumes climbing the stairs.

He hauls his body up two more steps and suddenly feels like he’s broken through a cloud barrier and emerged on a mountaintop. The air seems too thin and cold. Mist fogs over his eyes.

“Fuck,” he says immediately, leaning into the railing and lowering himself to sit on the stairs. He takes another breath and watches another swirl of mist roll past him, trying to decide whether enough blood is getting to his head to allow him to see. “Rich, I’m passing out,” he gasps. He goes further and turns, reclining on the steps, getting his head low.

“Oh, fuck,” Richie hisses. There’s a thud and Eddie hears him move closer on the deck—and then feels his body very close to his, his warmth almost touching him but not quite. “What do you need?”

“Uh, don’ lemme fall down the stairs?” he manages. It comes out in a ridiculous slur of sound. “Or hit my head,” he tries to add, but that’s even more mush-mouthed; he doubts somehow that Richie understood.

For a few seconds, he stops existing entirely.

Then he’s blinking and his vision is clearing as he looks up at the milk-pale sky. Awareness tingles back into his body, making him aware of the hard wooden stairs under him and pressing into his back, of Richie knelt over one of his legs and physically blocking him from sliding.

“Fuck,” Eddie gasps, relieved that the feeling is fading but mortified that this is happening.

“Hey,” Richie says. His voice is too warm, too soothing. It actually helps that he follows it up with, “What the fuck, dude?”

“Eat my shorts,” Eddie says. He closes his eyes again and waits for his head to stop spinning; he can feel sweat on the back of his neck, all the way down his spine to the small of his back. He definitely passed out there. He huffs out a long breath. “Did I fall?”

“No,” Richie says. “You laid down. Do you remember?”

“Yeah,” Eddie says. “Just wanted to make sure—I didn’t hit my head?”

“You didn’t hit your head,” Richie says. “You did rip a massive fart, though. I passed out, but it was just your methane fumes.”

Eddie snorts and kicks his ankle half-heartedly at Richie’s bare foot. “Liar.”

“Would I lie to you?”

“Yes, absolutely,” Eddie says. He opens his eyes.

Richie is frowning at him a little, his mouth almost ready to pull into a pout.

Eddie closes his eyes again, feeling guilty. “I’m fine,” he says. “It happens.”

Richie pauses for a moment, and then asks in an almost laughing voice, “What?”

It’s still a relief that almost nothing is off limits for Richie to joke about. Nothing could be worse than his silent pity. If Richie thinks that this is no more serious than his need to joke about Eddie’s job, or Eddie’s mother, or Eddie’s stoned appreciation for breakfast foods, that means he isn’t treating Eddie with kid gloves. He’s so fucking sick of being treated with kid gloves.

Blearily Eddie realizes he doesn’t know where his—Ben’s—Camelbak bottle got to. He was a little distracted trying not to crack his skull falling down the stairs, exactly like his stress dream. He turns his head to look for it and the world lurches around him, his blood audibly purring as it courses through his temples.

“What?” Richie asks from his perch over Eddie's thigh.

There’s something in there that his brain wants to process, but his body is prioritizing his survival right now. “Water,” he says, overwhelmed by his very physical exhaustion.

Without saying anything, Richie braces his left hand beside Eddie on the stairs and leans across him, reaching up and behind him for the water bottle. He’s very close. Dazedly Eddie looks at the underside of Richie’s chin and his Adam’s apple, feeling bracketed in by his big body. Then Richie leans back and holds the water bottle out to him.

For its part, Eddie’s body doesn’t much like the idea of him moving. He lifts his hand to take the bottle and keeps his elbow almost pinned to the stair, tilting his head only enough that he can drink out of the water bottle without drowning. The Camelbak straw is convenient for this. He’d have to fuck up pretty hard to slosh water all down himself.

Richie sits back on his heels, his thighs still bracketing one of Eddie’s. Eddie’s having trouble placing the look on his face. Something about the angle of his brows, the corners of his eyes. Richie’s mouth is stretched wide in a grin, but he’s always grinning, so that doesn’t tell him much.

“Whaddaya mean, ‘it happens’?” Richie demands, voice broad and flat. There’s a tension there, like he’s getting ready to tell a really good joke, like he’s setting up for a coup de grâce. The part of Eddie that grew up watching in awe as Richie got off the occasional really good one—the kind of joke that laid a whole classroom flat, or that got Bill to break and pound Richie on the back—sits up paying attention, wanting to watch Richie in his element.

But he also recognizes that he, Eddie, is the only possible target. It’s a double-edged sword.

“What, do I have to walk around with smelling salts now or something?” Richie asks flippantly.

“My lung collapsed, asshole.”

He can feel his head, his neck, the faint constant pain in his chest and torso. His legs are mostly offline—not in a worrisome way, just in a way that tells Eddie he’s going to have to move them around to get the circulation going again. He’s aware that, if he hadn’t just passed out, he’d be far more interested in Richie between his legs than he is right now. As it is, he thinks his brain has made the executive decision _you can’t deal with that right now_ and is sort of stopping the implications from hitting him. Richie made himself a physical block so that Eddie couldn’t slide like a ragdoll down the stairs. That’s sufficient gallantry for him.

Richie snorts. “Yeah, I was there.”

Eddie sets the Camelbak down and takes a few deep breaths. His body doesn’t want him to move—wants him to be the ragdoll and just lie here. He doesn’t know how long. It makes him think about Richie, asleep this morning like he was smashed on the mattress. Vulnerable.

So Eddie wiggles his fingers, and then his toes in his running shoes, windshield-wipers his ankles so his feet roll back and forth.

“Everything in working order?” Richie asks.

“Yeah,” Eddie says, hesitant about nodding. He genuinely thinks he didn’t hurt himself when he dropped, and he ought to be grateful for that, but he doesn’t want to just remain prone like an abandoned puppet. He braces his elbows and sits up slowly, feeling a sharp stretch between his shoulder blades and a deeper ache below his navel where his abdominal muscles have to engage. He grits his teeth and allows himself to groan as he sits up, and then he waits, propped up, to see if his brain is getting enough oxygen to allow him to keep going.

If he slips, he will collide dick-first with Richie’s kneecap. As if he didn’t have sufficient motivation to be careful.

Richie doesn’t ask him if he needs help, or even make fun of Eddie as he snarls at nothing trying to get upright. Eddie’s glad that Richie doesn’t offer, but his silence and stillness is almost worrying. Most of him is focused on getting upright with all of his limbs where he expects them to be, but there’s a small part of his brain that thinks, _watch. Be careful_. And not in the usual way that he watches Richie.

“I’m getting up,” he tells Richie.

“Uh-huh,” Richie agrees, not moving from his place.

Richie’s not sitting _on_ his leg, Eddie has enough room to move so that he can sit up on his ass instead of on his elbows. It’s weird that Richie doesn’t seem to think about the risk of Eddie accidentally kneeing him in the balls, but Eddie’s also not gonna draw more attention to either of their dicks than he has to. Instead he focuses on stacking his ribcage over his pelvis, his head on his shoulders.

He feels okay. More okay than he thinks he should necessarily be allowed to, having just blacked out on the porch. There’s also a faint itch in the back of his throat that he recognizes as a craving for carbonation. Jeez, has he conditioned himself to want Sprite after he passes out?

He reaches up as far as he can towards the railing but that requires getting his arm overhead; now Richie moves, seeing that he can’t do this himself. He slides one foot back and straightens up, offering his shoulder for Eddie to brace himself on. It’s for the best because Eddie has to twist to get his knees under him and come up slowly. Richie holds onto the railing and he lets Eddie hold onto him, and he doesn’t try to help any more than that.

Once on his own feet again, Eddie releases Richie’s shoulder and holds tight to the railing, bracing himself. The wood is a very different texture than the softness of Richie’s t-shirt. He just stands, focusing on whether or not he can stay up. He imagines he can feel the blood vessels in his brain constrict and then relax, but there are no black spots in his vision, nor little white sparks. A headache threatens at the base of his neck, ready to join the one spearing through his whole torso.

“How’s your fight with gravity going?” Richie asks.

“Better than your fight with dressing like an adult,” Eddie snaps back, choosing something at random to pick on.

Richie gives a loud barking laugh and Eddie feels satisfied, turning slowly to ascend the stairs. He feels a little fragile again—his hand is tight on the railing—but he’s pretty sure he can make it.

He hears Richie stepping up after him and the hairs on the back of his neck rise inexplicably. _Watch_ , says that little wary voice inside him again. He doesn’t know who it sounds like—not the nagging voice of his mother, or Myra, not Richie or any of the Losers. Why is it there? What’s he supposed to be watching for?

It’s slow going up the stairs. Eddie feels like a toddler learning to walk. Richie says nothing about his baby steps, but it’s not like he and Richie have any appointments today, any place to go in particular. Eddie has, for all he knows, all the time in the world.

Richie even holds the front door open for him when they get there. Eddie walks more easily across the landing, and then just as slowly up the smaller set of stairs to the upper level of the house. It’s a little embarrassing, how much it feels like a victory to get to the top. He has to brace himself on the banister and take some deep breaths, but for a guy who was in a coma this month, he’s pretty sure he could be doing worse.

Once Eddie’s off the stairs Richie walks past him, taking long strides like he did this morning again. This time it feels almost like he’s mocking Eddie, rubbing salt in the wound. By the time Eddie makes his way to the couch and sinks down onto it, he looks up to see Richie standing over him with a Tupperware container of cantaloupe, fork stabbed into the center of it, and a glass of water in the other hand. These he sets down on the coffee table. Then he looks at Eddie.

“Meds?” he asks.

Eddie nods, taking the moment to catch his breath. There’s a strange pressure between his ears, like his body knows he tried _exercising_ and now wants to punish him for it.

Richie leaves the room again and comes back with Eddie’s prescription bottles. He’s perfectly loud, shaking the house with his footsteps, the rattle of the pills in the plastic containers like maracas. Eddie’s throat tightens against his gag reflex but then he relaxes again. Richie thunks the bottles down on the coffee table and, when they overturn, carefully rights them again. Then he holds up both empty hands.

“Are we going anywhere today?” he asks.

“God, I hope not,” Eddie sighs.

“Cool,” Richie says, and leaves.

Eddie blinks, baffled to see him heading towards the stairs. For a moment he thinks Richie’s about to leave the house entirely, but then he turns and descends into the lower level of Ben’s house again. Nonplussed, Eddie frowns but then turns his attention to taking his medicine. He tips out his dose into his palm and swallows them with water, trying to appease the ache in his chest. He has to shudder as he gulps them down, but then it’s over. He sets the glass back down on the coaster and then realizes he left the Camelbak out on the porch. Stupid of him. He’ll have to get it later.

Richie moves heavily coming up the stairs, pace steady. Eddie turns his head to wait for him and sees the crown of his head appear. He looks almost like a mime in the middle of a performance, head and then neck and then shoulders; he’s holding something, but Eddie can’t see it from this angle because of how his body blocks his right arm. There’s something about the angle of his head relative to his shoulders, something about how he’s carrying his neck—

Oh.

Richie’s pissed at him.

Eddie feels stupid for taking so long to notice it, and then annoyed at Richie for expecting him to realize and respond—he just passed out, he has some other priorities. Richie says nothing, just swings back into the living room, slides between couch and coffee table, and sits down on the table with his knees spread. The fork in the Tupperware container overbalances and lands with a clatter on the sleek black modern surface; Eddie sees, as Richie rests the thing in his hand on his knee, that it’s a beer bottle. He’s spread wide, like some asshole on a subway—not that Eddie rides the subway if he can avoid it. He’s making himself bigger than he needs to be.

“Okay,” Richie says, voice flat and almost reasonable. “What the fuck do you mean, passing out ‘happens’?”

Eddie stares at him, an incredulous laugh caught in his throat. “You cannot _possibly_ be pissed at me for passing out. I got _impaled_.”

“Yeah, again, I was there,” Richie says. His tone is biting—this is Richie getting into the swing of things, getting ready to really go after Eddie, working up the momentum. The wind-up, and then the punch. “Kinda remember that. How long have you been passing out?”

Eddie glares at him. “This is the first time it’s happened since the hospital,” he says, and dares Richie to question him about it.

Instead, Richie stills. The slope of his shoulders relaxes. He visibly deflates.

“Oh,” he says.

“Yeah, _oh_ ,” Eddie snipes back at him.

He reaches out with his left arm to pick up the container of fruit, rests it on his lap, and then has to lean over further to pick up the fork. Richie notices his wince as he stretches, reaches his free hand down as though to nudge the fork closer, and then interrupts the movement and pulls his hand back. For some reason the conscious decision not to baby Eddie incenses him—the fact that it happened at all is the grievance—and Eddie snatches up the fork with a pointed flourish and a roll of his eyes.

Richie sets the beer down on the floor and puts his elbows on his knees, letting his hands hang down between them. Eddie looks down at the bottle disdainfully. “It’s early,” he points out; it’s not even eight in the morning yet. He stabs a cube of cantaloupe and puts it in his mouth.

The second he bites down, he realizes that he forgot about his broken tooth. The shock of pain from the cold fruit makes him regret his choices. He has to fight hard to maintain his expression of righteous indignation.

Richie ignores it. “Yeah, well, I don’t have great coping mechanisms,” he says. His feet are still bare; he prods at the perspiring bottle on the carpet with a toe.

Mouth full of cold and pain, Eddie coughs out a laugh. “What the fuck do you have to cope with?” he demands around the crushed fruit. He doesn’t taste blood. He doesn’t.

Richie lifts his head to look at him and for a moment he reminds Eddie of nothing so much as Pennywise, with the thin stretched smile and the eyes widened just enough to be threatening. “Are you fucking kidding me?” he asks, his voice pleasant, even amused.

 _Watch_ , says that little voice inside Eddie—and suddenly Eddie recognizes it. It’s his own, but small, because he’s maybe thirteen years old. The voice of a child who grew up hunted and now knows to look for danger; the one who’s been silent for decades because Eddie forgot all about him.

It’s horrible. He’s angry at himself for thinking it, because Richie Tozier is not scary, is not a danger to him. Richie would never hurt him.

But he could, Eddie remembers. A long time ago, Eddie genuinely thought that Richie was getting ready to leave Bill to the clown in the sewers, because that’s what Richie wanted all of them to think. He wanted to make Bill sweat. He wanted to be theatrical, so he could be magnificent when he reached for the baseball bat.

“I mean _right now_ ,” Eddie says, because he hasn’t forgotten what Richie and the rest of them lived through too. “I told you I was passing out, I told you what to do, I didn’t hit my head, and I didn’t fall down the stairs.” If he were feeling more magnanimous he might say _thank you for not letting me fall down the stairs_ , but his tooth hurts and his chest hurts and he’s sort of angry at Richie for being angry.

Richie spreads both arms wide at the elbows, taking up _even more space_. Eddie, on the couch, is aware of the half-wall behind him and Richie in front of him. He’s almost boxed in.

“For fuck’s sake, you can’t help passing out, I know you can’t help passing out,” Richie says. “I thought when you said _it happens_ you meant you were blacking out every time you stood up and this is just the first time I was there to see it.”

Eddie’s not blacking out _every time he stands up_ , but it is the first time Richie was there to see it. He doesn’t love that either. He prods gently at his broken tooth as he works the cantaloupe over to the other side of his mouth and bites down on it so quickly that the cold seems to soak from his molar straight into his jaw. It’s miserable. He gulps down the cold cantaloupe.

Richie sits there, his elbows slowly listing toward his knees, his contrition melting away.

“Oh, you fucker,” he says, his voice low and dangerous.

Richie gets quiet, so Eddie gets loud. “It’s not _every time I stand up!_ ” he insists. Richie rolls his eyes so Eddie shouts louder. “Hey, I don’t need your help!” he snaps. “I handled it fine on my own, I told you it’s the first time I’ve actually blacked out since the hospital, and considering I was in the fucking _shower_ the last time, I don’t know what the fuck you think you could have done for me.”

As though Eddie’s voice is enough to blast him away, Richie gets up from the table and takes large steps around it, between the two leather armchairs, to stand on the edge of the room. Eddie knows what this means—Richie’s going to match him at every level, is going to be _big_ and _loud_ and _furious_ the way Eddie is now, because that’s what Richie does.

“You passed out _in the shower_?” Richie demands, slumping forward over the back of the leather armchair so that the sweating beer bottle draws a straight line down the upholstery. “Fucking _when_? You weren’t allowed to shower in the hospital—you said you haven’t passed out _since the hospital_!”

It’s a total _gotcha_ , a _j’accuse_. The fact that Richie’s trying to catch him in a lie makes him angrier.

“I _told_ you, I _didn’t_ pass out in the shower!” he snaps back. “I thought I _might_ , so I _sat the fuck down_ and then it _went away_!”

_“When?”_

With all this shouting at each other, Eddie’s sort of glad Ben doesn’t have neighbors. Eddie can’t draw full breath and his voice isn’t as strong as he might otherwise like it to be, but he’s not doing too badly for himself. He flails his hands uselessly, because he can’t shrug without aggravating his stitches, and his chest and jaw hurt, and the _fucking painkillers_ haven’t kicked in yet.

“I don’t fucking know, right around when Ben and Bev left,” he says. “Does it fucking _matter_?” It’s been over a week since then, a full week without incident, he’s improving. Can’t Richie see that it doesn’t matter?

Richie brings both arms up toward his head, shaking the beer bottle like he’s forgotten that he’s holding it. He rotates in place like he’s so angry with Eddie that he can’t actually stay still. “Are you _kidding me_?” he asks again. “What, are you gonna be taking one of your _four showers of the day_ and I’m just gonna hear a _thud_ and it’s gonna be you breaking your neck in the bathroom?”

_“Hey!”_

Eddie’s voice breaks in the middle of the scream and Richie recoils, head bobbing back like Eddie physically struck him. It hurts Eddie’s throat to strain that loud. He throws the container of fruit down on the coffee table and it tips over, spilling juice onto the shiny surface. He doesn’t care.

“I told you I don’t need a caretaker,” he says, so angry his voice is shaking now. “I don’t need a caretaker, I don’t need a _mother_ , I am _forty fucking years old_ , and you _fucking said_ —”

“You know,” Richie says over him. He’s not even shouting. That makes it so much worse, because Richie’s voice is stronger than his, Richie’s voice has always been louder than his, even before he was injured; but it’s because he’s hurt now that Eddie can’t fight back as hard and Richie is taking advantage of that. “You like to act like you’re the responsible adult and everyone’s fucking crazy for giving a shit about you, but then you pull shit like _this_.”

Eddie feels his nostrils flare as he draws in a breath through his nose. “Like what?” he asks, daring Richie to say it.

Richie, as always, lives up to expectations. “Like hiding things like a fucking child,” he snarls back at him. “I told you, I don’t want to be your mother. So stop _making me be your fucking mother_.”

It cuts so deep that, for a moment, Eddie is stunned into silence and stillness. Then he laughs from somewhere deep down in that wound, so deep it hurts.

“Oh, is that what I’m doing?” he demands.

“Yeah, that’s what you’re doing,” Richie replies without hesitation. “That’s what you like doing—you pretend like you’re the fucking responsible one, like you have all your shit together, and then you do this shit and make other people _have_ to be the fucking adult, so you can bitch them out for it.”

“You think _you’re_ the adult?” Eddie demands. “You? You went AWOL from your job. You turned off your phone and ignored the real world to play _house_ with me for a month in _Ben’s fucking architectural nightmare_. Is that what being an adult means to you, Rich?”

Richie laughs long and loud and mean then. At top volume he shouts, _“Well, you know what they say about people who live in glass houses!”_

For a long moment Eddie waits, processing that. But there’s no way to avoid it: yes, Richie did just make a joke in the middle of a fight.

Before he knows what he’s doing, he leans down with his left hand, grabs the half-full glass of water, and flings the contents in Richie’s direction.

He’s too far away. Eddie’s arm is too weak. Water splatters over Ben’s nice leather chairs.

They both look down at the splash zone. Then their heads snap up at the same time. Eddie is panting, he’s so angry. Fuck exercise, he should have just screamed at Richie for half an hour to get his heart rate up.

Richie is smiling faintly. “Did you just throw a drink at me?” he asks at normal speaking volume. Quiet for Richie.

“Oh, look at that. Your glasses work,” Eddie snipes back.

Richie’s shoulders jerk in a silent laugh. It’s not performative; it looks like Richie’s fighting it. Then his smile softens a little and he shakes his head, his mouth still slightly open. “I fucking—” he starts, and then interrupts himself by jamming the beer bottle into his mouth, hooking the cap behind his teeth, and pulling.

“Oh my god,” Eddie says, horrified. “Oh my god, what are you—?”

Richie pries the cap off with his teeth and spits it into his palm, then takes a swig of the beer.

Eddie has to sit down. His brain whirls with scattered concepts: his own broken tooth, and the possibility that Richie ripped up his gums doing that, and the fact that Wentworth Tozier is a dentist, and the absurd thought that with an overbite like that of course Richie bites off bottlecaps.

He finds his hands are shaking. He sets the empty glass back down on the coaster—there’s a little dribble of water down the side that pools onto the cut stone. For lack of anything else to do, Eddie straightens up the Tupperware container. He’ll need a towel or something, for the juice puddled on the table and the water that Eddie just threw across the room like a heroine in a telenovela or something.

He leans back on the couch. There’s no pain from his anterior incision, but there is a sensation of _pressure_ , a _watch it, mister_ from his own injuries. First he tucks his hands between his knees and squeezes them together so he doesn’t have to watch them tremble; then he slumps forward, pushes his hand over his chin, curls his fingers over his mouth.

Across the room, Richie lowers his beer bottle. He remains there in no-man’s land, safe behind his furniture barricade in case Eddie decides to throw the fork or something. From his position on the couch, Richie’s broad shoulders totally block Eddie’s view of the desk and the chair where they kissed last night.

Richie looks almost slack, somehow. Like the fight’s gone out of him. But is it yielding or giving up entirely?

There’s a long moment where they just blink at each other.

Eddie takes a steadying breath through his nose, feeling his ribs expand as much as they can. Then he asks, “Can I have a sip of your beer?”

Richie stares blankly at him. Then in slow motion his face breaks into a laugh, his eye squinting up. His voice is quiet and almost fond when he says, “If I threw this at you, it would serve you right.” But he still crosses the room, slipping between the big square armchairs, and holds out the beer bottle for Eddie.

Eddie reaches out as far as he can with his left arm and takes it, then inspects the lip of the bottle. There’s no evidence of chipped glass or scratches from Richie’s teeth or blood from his mouth.

“Would serve you right if you hurt yourself doing that, you fucking chipmunk,” he replies. Then he takes a sip. The beer flows bitter into his mouth, full of tiny carbonated bubbles.

He just took a bunch of opioid painkillers; he’s not about to try to get drunk. But he wanted to see if Richie would still let him talk him down like this. If he would still give Eddie what he had without question, whether or not Eddie deserved it.

He hands the bottle back to Richie. Richie takes it surprisingly gently, no whipping it out of Eddie’s hands or making fun of him for his irresponsible mix of medication, an empty stomach, and what tastes like an IPA. Eddie sighs again, leans all the way back on the couch, and covers his face with both hands.

“I can’t believe I just did that,” he admits.

“What?” Richie asks. It’s not just the illusion of pleasantry this time; he sounds genuinely amused. “Bossed me around again?”

“I don’t fight like that,” Eddie mumbles.

Richie laughs again. “I’ve never seen you fight any other way.”

Slowly he sets the bottle down on the coffee table, then braces both hands on it and lowers himself to the ground. He bends his knees in front of him and wraps both arms around them. Eddie is astonished once again by how _young_ he looks, how familiar and cute. He could be thirteen years old, on the ground in the Barrens, ripping up pieces of grass to drop down the back of Eddie’s shirt.

Eddie slots his fingers closed so he can’t gawk at him anymore. “Sorry I threw a fucking drink at you,” he says.

“That was fucking hysterical,” Richie says. “I don’t know what the fuck kind of routine that’s going into, but I’m gonna talk about that one day.”

It wasn’t okay. “I’m still sorry,” Eddie says. He lowers his hands and looks out the window, to the green stillness of the front lawn.

“Yeah, well, sorry I brought your mom into it,” Richie says casually.

“Yeah, that wasn’t okay either.” Eddie turns his head to look at him. “What the fuck?”

Richie’s expression turns almost quizzical, like Eddie is misunderstanding the point and he doesn’t know how to break it to him. He shrugs. “I was trying to hurt your feelings?” he says slowly.

“Yeah, I got that,” Eddie says, and has to swallow down the hysteria and steady himself before he can continue. “That’s why I hurt your feelings _back_.”

“I don’t have feelings,” Richie insists.

“Fucking liar.”

Richie shrugs again, mock-grandiose.

Somehow Eddie feels better. Like this whole thing passed through the room like a windstorm, leaving them quiet and still in its wake. Eddie doesn’t usually think of this after fights. When he argued with his mother she’d press him into backing down and then continue to radiate wounded rage into the shared air. Myra’s temper blew over slowly, nothing to be done about it, and if Eddie said the wrong thing she would snap and ignite again. He’s not used to this—just saying the worst thing he could think of to spit it into the room between them and let each other deal with the fallout.

“How long have you been sitting on that glass houses line?” Eddie asks.

Richie shakes his head. “That was all improv right there, baby, I don’t know what to tell you, I’m fucking good at my job.”

 _Baby_ twists at something in Eddie’s gut. Eddie’s not sure if it’s pleasant or not, the way it makes him squirm; so he pulls a face to tell Richie not to do it again. Richie doesn’t react, but Eddie knows he’s watching him, so he saw it, even if he chooses not to acknowledge it.

“Hey,” Richie says, and stretches out one leg long. His foot appears on the other side of the coffee table, pale on the neutral carpet; he prods at the black leather of the couch. Eddie looks down at it like a mouse suddenly skittered toward him from under the furniture.

“What?”

“Come over here.” To illustrate his point further, Richie pats the floor beside him.

Eddie stares at him. “Why?”

“Just come here,” Richie urges. Then he adds, “Not if you can’t. If you can’t, just tell me to fuck off.”

“Well, fuck off,” Eddie says, already standing up. He stomps around the side of the coffee table as best as he can. He never went along with Richie because he had the _best_ ideas, he went along with Richie because arguing with him about it was usually a good time, and sometimes he stumbled across something that made it really worth it. Sometimes.

He has to brace himself between the seat of a chair with one hand and plant the other on Richie’s shoulder as he sinks down to the floor next to him. His chest strains and relaxes, strains and relaxes. His glutes ache as he pulls his knees up—not as far as Richie, he’s not as bendy, but he can brace them against the edge of the coffee table to hold them up. The soreness in his body is almost meditative. He stretches against it.

“We’re too fucking old for this,” he says, wanting to chalk his difficulties up to age instead of his injuries.

Richie goes along with it. “Don’t I know it,” he says, and toasts Eddie with the beer bottle.

Eddie gives a long sigh and then, on a whim, leans sideways into Richie. He’s surprised how much better he feels, just to be touching Richie at all. He puts his head on his shoulder, trying to show him that he knows Richie didn’t mean what he said. He knows Richie’s thing is putting his foot in his mouth so hard he kicks his own teeth in.

This space after anger is sort of a relief. It’s over and done.

“I don’t think you’re making me do anything,” Richie says.

“I know.”

Richie drinks from the bottle again. Eddie has to look at the boring leather furniture so he doesn’t linger on the way Richie’s lips wrap around the neck. He pulls off with a soft wet sound and says, “I’m just kind of an inherently shitty person.”

“Fuck you,” says Eddie, who is still trying to come to terms with having been kind of a shitty unhappy person for the last twenty-plus years. “That’s not a fucking excuse.”

Richie laughs, nasal and sincere. “God, you and my therapist would have gotten along great.”

“You have a therapist?”

Richie shakes his head. “Not anymore. I told you I did rehab, right?

“Right,” Eddie says, glancing nervously at the bottle in Richie’s hand and then immediately feeling stupid for it. Depressants and accelerants are very different things. He continues to look at the seamwork along the couch cushions.

“I don’t think you’re making me do anything,” he goes on. “I think I’m just shitty, so I…” He shakes his head. “I want you to be in control of yourself, you know?”

“I am,” Eddie insists, despite how that’s so not true that he can’t even watch Richie drink out of a beer bottle.

“No, I mean—you’re in charge of what you need to do. You just—just tell me what you need, and I’ll do it, I don’t care, I’d wipe your ass. I’m not above that.”

Eddie is _revolted_. “If you ever say that again, I’ll beat you to death with a beer bottle.”

Richie’s mouth twists up into a smirk. “Ah, just how I always thought I would die.”

With the sort of instinctive discomfort of someone who grew up in Derry, Maine, Eddie glances from one side of the room to the other before saying, “That’s fucking dark, man.”

“Point is,” Richie says without commentary, “I trust you.”

And Eddie knows that. Eddie was totally wrong this morning about a possible home intruder, but Richie took his word for it. They sat in the car like idiots with the doors locked, until Eddie could process what was actually happening and calm the fuck down.

Eddie adjusts his head on Richie’s shoulder, feeling the promontory of bone against his temple.

“And it’s not that I’m gonna stop trusting you,” Richie says. “Just please don’t make me regret it.”

Eddie’s heart clenches like a fist. It hurts so much that he has to duck his head, leaning forward and hissing through his teeth with his chin almost to his chest. “Fuck, I forgot you talk for a living,” he manages.

“What?” Richie asks.

Eddie shakes his head and straightens up, breathing until the tightness in his chest eases. “I don’t know. Somewhere you learned to sound reasonable.”

He laughs softly. “You’re probably the first person to say that.”

It’s Eddie’s turn to meet Richie where he is. “I don’t actually give a shit what you do about your job.” That sounds blunter and more apathetic than he meant it to; he winces and course-corrects. “I mean, I care as much as it stresses you out. But—it’s none of my fucking business, and I don’t think you’re shitty for taking some time off.”

“Oh, no, I’m definitely being shitty,” Richie says.

Eddie jams an elbow into Richie’s ribs. He doesn’t have great leverage here, but it’s enough to make Richie sway in place.

“We all almost died,” Eddie says. “I think we’re entitled to a little time off.”

“Oh, those entitled Gen Xers,” Richie laughs. “Those entitled little risk analysists in their little suits, thinking they’re entitled to take a break after a near-death experience, fuck.”

“It was an actual death experience.”

“Yeah, but you couldn’t make it stick, huh, could you, Kaspbrak?”

It’s _really_ fucking dark, but the apple of Richie’s cheek where his smile curls up almost makes it sweet. Eddie rolls his eyes and then lets his head rest on Richie’s shoulder again.

Richie continues drinking. He seems as burned out as Eddie is, gone contemplative now. “Can you do one thing for me?” he asks.

Eddie sort of hopes he’s about to ask for something ridiculous or disgusting, something that Eddie won’t have to take seriously, so there’s no way for him to fuck it up. “Depends,” he hedges.

“That’s fair,” Richie says. “Can you shower with the door unlocked?”

They both process what he just said.

Richie holds up a hand. “Not because I’m a pervert!” he says quickly. “Just—I’m gonna be listening for you to drop now, and if I hear you hit the ground and I can’t get in there to see you’re still alive, I’m gonna freak out and break the door down.”

It’s… not an unreasonable request. If Eddie loses consciousness in the bathroom, he might actually need Richie to break the door down—which is an incongruous and fascinating mental image, when he’s not thinking about the situations under which it might be necessary.

“Can’t you just knock on the door and see if I tell you to fuck off?” he asks. Something about it makes him squirm, unrelated to either previous stabbings he suffered in a bathroom or the idea of Richie barreling through a locked door.

“I figure I’ll do that anyway,” Richie says. “Just—I’m not gonna do anything, I just want to know that—” He cuts himself off.

Eddie can fill in the blanks. “That I’m safe,” he says colorlessly.

Richie makes a frustrated little noise. “I know you’re safe,” he says. “I want to know you’re not gonna drown in the bathtub while I’m being paranoid outside.”

Bleakly he imagines it. His naked body on the bathroom floor, half spilled out of the tub. His blood running into the water, or pooling on the floor under him. Richie walking in to see him sprawled there like a corpse, finishing the job Bowers started back in Derry.

“I don’t want you to find me like that,” he says.

“Uh, yeah, that’s the idea,” Richie says.

Eddie tightens his elbows to his sides and wraps his hands around them, hugging himself a little. “No, I mean—in the shower. I don’t…” He feels like he has to put more distance between himself and Richie, so he takes his head off his shoulder and shifts his weight more toward the coffee table. He’s trying to be subtle. As if Richie won’t notice. The imagined vulnerability is too much for him.

Peripherally he can see Richie watching him, big black eyes peering at him over the brown bottle. “I mean, if I walk in and you’re not out cold, you can throw whatever you want at me, I promise,” Richie says. “Anyone ever tell you, you look like Andrew Perkins? I’m not gonna do the—” He imitates the shrieking strings from _Psycho_ , holding up the beer bottle like he’s wielding a knife.

“It’s not—” Eddie sighs, exasperated. “I don’t think you’re gonna, like, _do_ anything or… _murder_ me, I just—I don’t look good naked, all right?” he explodes, shoving away from Richie.

Richie sets the bottle down in a whole hell of a hurry, catching him by the shoulders and leaning in, holding him in place.

Eddie immediately feels stupid and raw. The quiet in the room is now oppressive and miserable and Eddie’s filling it with nonsense and he can’t stop himself. “Because there’s a fucking hole in my chest and it’s fucking bad enough I can’t get the one on my back by myself, and I am _not_ being unreasonable about it, Stan says he doesn’t like Patty to look at them either, because they’re fucking ugly and—”

“Okay. Okay, we’re having two different conversations here.”

Eddie stares at the coffee table for a lack of anything safer in the room to look at and realizes that Richie didn’t even bother using a coaster. Ben went to the trouble of getting these expensive cut-stone coasters and do his house guests even use them? No. Instead Eddie throws water over his upholstery.

It’s probably lamb leather. Lambs probably died for this furniture and look how Eddie’s disrespecting it.

“We’re _not_ having two different conversations—”

“We fucking are, because I’m nervous about you passing out and drowning, and you’re nervous about me seeing you naked, which I already have done, smartass,” Richie says.

Eddie draws his knees tighter to his chest. His spine doesn’t want to bend; the tops of his thighs don’t even come close to touching his torso. He knows he’s shielding himself like a child. “No, you haven’t,” he mutters. He’s pretty sure he’s only ever been half-naked in front of Richie.

“Dude, I know what happened to you. I _saw_ you get impaled. I’m not—I still fucking tried to grind on you last night, dumbass.”

Wow. From smartass to dumbass in two sentences. Eddie flushes hot at the admission in so many words.

Richie nudges him, keeping his elbow up near Eddie’s shoulders instead of any of the tender real estate of his ribs. It’s probably more consideration than Eddie necessarily deserves. “Hey. Hey,” he says. “If I have to save your life again, I promise I’ll still get a boner over you after. I’m not complicated.”

“Fuckhead,” Eddie mutters, amused despite himself.

“Eddie,” Richie says, and prods him again with his elbow. “Eddie, lie back.”

This gets Eddie to look up at him. Richie’s expression has turned from _earnest_ to _up to something_ ; it’s all in the eyebrows. “Why?” he asks, suspicious.

“Just lie back.”

He knows for a fact that Richie will try to provoke him into doing it, just like he provoked him into walking over here. Eddie can’t decide if he wants to make him work harder for it again. He looks at the narrow space around him, trying to see if there’s even room for his head and shoulders on the floor. There is, maybe, if he leans more toward Richie so he lines up between the armchairs.

“Why?” he insists.

“Just because,” Richie says, like a liar.

But Eddie kind of wants to see what happens.

He cautiously relaxes arms and shoulders, leaning back and lowering himself slowly to the floor. The muscles in his back compress as his weight slowly loses the battle to hold itself up.

“Don’t you trust me?” Richie asks sweetly.

“That is the _least trustworthy way_ to ask a _really untrustworthy question_ ,” Eddie says. His shoulders make contact with the floor and he consciously relaxes. His knees are still pushed up against the coffee table; his heels are fairly close to his ass. It’s honestly probably a good stretch for his sore legs. “ _Furthermore_ ,” he says, “you saying that always came before me getting in a lot of trouble when we were kids.”

“No it didn’t, you fucking liar.”

“It so did!” Eddie insists.

“Blah blah blah—were we ever arrested? It was fine,” Richie says airily.

“Your standards are too fucking low,” Eddie sulks.

Richie hasn’t moved much, but now he unfolds his other leg and lets it stretch out in front of him. He leans back and lets his shoulders rest on the armchair behind him. Eddie tenses, but when Richie makes no move to roll closer to him, or to touch him, he relaxes a little.

“Feel better?” Richie asks.

“No,” Eddie says, incredulous. “Why would I?”

“You’re short; I thought you’d feel better if you were closer to the ground.”

Eddie’s abdominal muscles contract immediately, his head and shoulders coming up off the floor. “I am not!” he starts, but Richie rolls over almost on top of him and Eddie has to fend him off, curling up like a pillbug and trying to block him with his knees.

But Richie is _big_ , and he can go deadweight like this, stretched out on the floor and so much bigger than Eddie. He pushes Eddie’s knees to the side and pins them under his broad chest—not painful, just keeping them out of the way, while Eddie tries to swat at him like they’re children again. Richie leans harder on Eddie’s legs and catches one of Eddie’s hands with his, pinning it close to his shoulder and leaning down. Eddie shoves at him uselessly.

“Easy, easy,” Richie says. “Don’t hurt yourself.”

“Fuck you!” Eddie shrieks. “What are you doing? Rich!”

Richie shoves the bottom of Eddie’s sweatshirt and shirt up. It’s still trapped under his hips, but the material rests easily on his stomach—not all the way up his body, not even showing his ribs, but enough to show a stripe of the white bandage taped to his chest. Eddie tries to shove his shirt down, to hide the black bruising at the edges of the injury, but Richie grabs his other hand and pins it to the floor.

Eddie’s breath catches in his chest.

Lying across Eddie’s legs, Richie grins down at him, pinned and exposed and helpless. Eddie’s heart rate starts to pick up, the little voice in his head saying, _watch, watch_. Not because Richie’s angry or because Richie might hurt him, because he’s not and he won’t. Just because Richie’s dangerous.

Richie’s grin widens and he lowers his face to Eddie’s stomach and blows a massive raspberry just under his navel. It’s so fucking juvenile—and it tickles—and it vibrates all the way across his skin. Eddie’s scream rises into laughter and he gets his lower leg free, swinging it over the trapped other one to kick his heel into Richie’s back.

“Fuck you!” he shrieks. “Get off me! What the fuck!”

Richie takes in a loud breath like he’s gearing up for another one, but he’s laughing too hard. He has to roll sideways off Eddie, letting go of his right hand so he can swing Eddie’s free leg over his head. Wary, Eddie holds up his right foot like a shield. He’s wearing shoes; he has the higher ground, sort of.

“Just keeping you on your toes, Eds,” Richie says cheerfully. “You can take it. You’re tough.”

“I’m going to kick you in the face,” Eddie says. He puts his foot down and waits, tense, right hand hovering over his belly like a shield.

“Watch the glasses,” Richie says. “My insurance will only pay for one pair a year.” He smiles.

Only then does he release Eddie’s left hand so that he can sit up straight, smirk at him, and go back to drinking his beer. Eddie flexes his fingers open and then into a fist, still feeling the phantom scrape of the carpet on his skin.


	22. Is That Anything?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Eddie wants: bandage, bacon, and Richie not to break down the bathroom door. And we know that whatever Eddie wants, Eddie gets.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings: The big one is, Eddie non-sexually and exploratorily sticks a finger in his butt in the shower. He is not impressed. If you want to skip that entirely--and who could blame you?--jump from "This is the politely inquisitive mindset" to "He removes his hands and"; use of prescribed painkillers; hypochondria and health anxiety; Monty Python references; making out; sexual tension chicken; mention of erections; bandage removal; discussion of cannibalism; leave the manatees alone; _Hot Ones_ ; Falco; The Cure; non-explicit sexual fantasy in the shower; Eddie has unrealistic expectations about sex between men and a sort of all-or-nothing idea of penetrative sex; The Cure; New World Order; _Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights_.

By the time Eddie realizes that he’s feeling the painkillers, he’s eating cantaloupe on the couch. He turns an irregularly-cut piece of fruit over and over on the end of his fork, contemplating the gradient from pale orange to deep green. He needs some more bright color in his life. He has Richie, and Richie is bright and vivid, but he feels like there could be more.

And eventually it occurs to him that he hasn’t looked up from the fruit in a while, which means he’s definitely stoned.

He glances up a little guiltily to see if Richie has noticed him being weird, but Richie’s not looking at him. He’s perched in the leather armchair on top of the towel they left there to soak up the water Eddie threw. His knees are folded up to his chest, his bare feet poking over the edge of the seat. His head is tilted at a slight angle, leaning toward his shoulder as he looks down at his phone and squints at it through his glasses. He has one headphone in one ear, and the other dangles loosely and rests on his chest on his black t-shirt.

Eddie’s not used to seeing Richie still, accustomed as he is to his multitasking and fidgeting. In his pajamas and folded up like that, he looks comfortable. Cozy. Domestic.

_What if_ , an indulgent little voice in Eddie’s head suggests, _you had a chair like that? Think of all the things you could keep on that chair. One entire Richie, for example._ And Eddie could just walk into his living room, and Richie would be there.

He thinks he likes living with Richie. He might like it more if he were more mobile and self-sufficient, and able to take turns preparing meals and driving and sharing the burden of work. He’d also like to test Richie out through holiday stressors and lost luggage at an airport and when a squirrel accidentally gets into the house and they have to catch it in a salad spinner and escort it back out. He knows how Richie handles a life-or-death situation, but he wants to see how Richie responds to more mundane problems. He believes that’s how you know a person: day-to-day.

In a perfect world, Eddie thinks he’d like to try living with Richie when he’s back to normal. He has no reason to think Richie will go for such a thing—he doubts Richie wants to come out publicly, and if he wants to keep his private life private, he might not want to have a male roommate at forty years old. But in a perfect world, he’d like to share space with Richie.

Richie glances up at him. His eyebrows are inquisitive, and he smiles at Eddie like he’s amused by him, like he’d like to laugh at him but he’s waiting to make the joke. All he says is, “How’s that cantaloupe treating you?”

Eddie considers admitting that he’s sitting here fantasizing about Richie being his live-in boyfriend—not even doing anything, just sitting in chairs in a house that they own instead of a glass lozenge loaned to them out of Ben’s good heart. What would Richie’s face do if Eddie voiced the suggestion?

“I’m high,” Eddie says. “And I need to take a shower.”

Richie’s grin widens predictably on _I’m high_ , but he tugs his headphone out of his ear when Eddie goes on. “Huh?” he asks, like he didn’t hear.

“I need to shower,” he says. “Make me get up.”

He says it because he knows Richie can’t make him do anything. Or—if he can, he won’t. That’s why it’s safe to ask. Richie can tease him, needle him, goad him into doing things, but Eddie always gets to choose.

“Why?” Richie asks, eyebrow going up.

“Because I don’t want to,” Eddie admits. It suddenly feels like a long walk from the couch to the bathroom. And he was enjoying creepily staring at Richie and fruit. “And I have to take a shower.”

“You want me to make you get up, whaddaya want me to do, start playing the national anthem?” Richie removes an imaginary baseball cap and presses it to his chest, lowering his chin and his gaze solemnly.

“Yeah, it’s patriotism,” Eddie says. “I need you to invoke my love of my country so I can take a shower.”

“Oh, wait, wait, wait,” Richie says. He turns his fist to the side and silently clears his throat. Then, in a comically deep voice, he intones, _“All rise.”_

It’s so not what Eddie was expecting that he actually drops his fork when he laughs. “What was that?”

“It’s a bailiff,” Richie says. “I can do the Irish cop for you if you think that’d work better, hang on.”

“No!” Eddie cackles, having bypassed amusement and gone straight into hysteria, leaning back on the armrest. He braces his ribs so that he doesn’t hurt himself laughing. Is this what Richie feels when he goes cataplexic with mirth?

From across the room Richie surveys him in his recline on the couch. “So that was counterproductive,” he says. Eddie is less upright than he started. “Why do you need to shower?”

“Huh?” He has to stop to catch his breath. He already fainted once today; he’s not trying to tax his hypoxic brain further.

“Why do you need to shower? Normally you nap and then shower.”

“Because I sweated when I passed out,” he says.

At his age, sweating is kind of a constant. He’s been aware of and revolted by it for some time, but it’s never been so inconvenient. Forget his lifetime of avoiding germs, now he’s supposed to avoid sweat. And the stakes aren’t “that’s disgusting,” but “that’s dangerous.”

Richie unfolds and puts his feet on the floor, then pushes his glasses up the bridge of his nose with an index finger. It’s such a nerdy gesture—so _familiar_ —that Eddie’s heart twists.

“I thought last time you passed out in the shower,” he says. He keeps his voice carefully neutral and non-judgmental, which is suspicious in itself.

Eddie bristles anyway. “Did not pass out,” he insists. He won’t mention the crawling around on the floor like something out of a Gothic novel. Somehow he thinks it might weaken his point.

“Okay,” Richie says slowly. His gaze flicks off to the side, towards the window. He pauses and Eddie can see him weighing his words—and it’s so interesting to watch him do that now, something Richie seemed incapable of when they were kids. Apparently condescension wins out: “You sure you’re not gonna pass out in the shower again?”

Eddie’s affectionate daydream about cohabiting strains a little under his very real irritation. “No, Richie, I’m not sure,” he snaps. “But I’m also not sure that all this sweat on my chest incisions from my sixteen hours of reparative thoracic surgery after I got stabbed by an alien clown demon won’t result in an antibiotic-resistant infection that will lead to sepsis and death. Or MRSA. What if I get MRSA? And considering that, the last time I passed out, I survived, I think that if it happens again I’ll be fucking fine.” He glares.

Richie glares back at him, his eyelids half-shut and the fringes of his lashes lowered snobbishly. He drawls, “I mean, the last time you got an infection, you survived too. _And_ the last time you were stabbed by an alien clown demon, you survived that.”

“I’m not gonna swear off taking showers,” Eddie says. “If you’re gonna fight with me over taking showers, I’m calling Ben right now and telling him to come home, and you can fly out to Location Redacted and keep Bev company and tell her when she can and can’t bathe and see how well that goes over, I swear.” Bev would wreck his shit.

It’s an empty threat. If Richie tries to fight with him over taking showers, Eddie will fight with him every time, because he’s right to do so and Richie knows it. But he has to say it anyway.

Richie holds his glare for a moment, and then tilts his head and smiles. It’s almost a nice smile, but not quite; Richie remains as sharp-toothed as ever.

“You know how I know you’re high?”

“Fucking _how_?” he asks dully, the same tone he uses to reply _who’s there_ when Richie sets up a knock-knock joke.

“You’re at like half speed, so I can actually understand what the fuck you’re saying.” Richie frowns but not at Eddie, as though in concentration, and then says in the strongest New York dialect Eddie has ever heard, “Have you _heard_ of _MRSA_?”

“Is that me?” Eddie asks flatly. “Is that supposed to be me?”

“Who does it sound like?” Richie asks.

“Like Fran Drescher.”

Richie laughs. He picks up his phone and leans forward to set it on the table, and then his expression becomes businesslike, task-oriented. “You need bandage help?”

Patiently Eddie says, “You know I do, you put it there.”

“I can help you spot-clean them now, and then I can make you some bacon before you take a shower,” Richie suggests. “You know, get some protein in you, toughen you up before you go stand on your feet?”

Eddie lets his head fall forward and then pushes his hands into his hair in frustration. “Rich.”

“Eds.”

“Don’t—”

The _don’t call me that_ is reflexive, but Eddie likes being called Eds, he just doesn’t want to be sweet-talked right now. It’s definitely a bribe—Richie’s offering him a compromise but he’s offering bacon to make it more appealing. But if Eddie says the words _sweet talk_ out loud, who knows what kind of tangents Richie will go off on? And how long will it take him to get back on topic?

Eddie sighs and lifts his head, deciding to try a different angle. “Okay,” he says, holding up both hands parallel. “Look at it this way.”

Richie puts on his magnanimity, leaning back in the chair and kicking both legs up over the armrest. “I’m listening,” he says. Eddie feels like he’s negotiating with some kind of irreverent child emperor, who has infinite power and no concept of the real world.

“You know how we’ve survived multiple murder attempts?” he asks, trying to be reasonable.

“No, remind me,” Richie replies.

Eddie gives him a dirty look and continues to his next point. “You know how we fought and killed an alien clown demon from hell that fed off of fear and live children?”

“Doesn’t ring a bell.”

The lines are very clear for Eddie. Many events of his life were not just stratospherically unlikely, they were fucking impossible. In comparison, mundane things like infection and low blood pressure and vasovagal responses are so much more likely. And wouldn’t it just be the perfect insult added to injury—the perfect cherry on top of the most traumatic events of Eddie’s life—to survive attempted murder not once, not twice, but _three_ times, only to die of something completely preventable that the old Eddie—the _adult_ , cautious Eddie that he used to know how to be—would never have succumbed to?

He feels like he doesn’t know how to exist in the world anymore. He can’t find a happy medium. He never wanted to put the child he used to be behind him, but that kid has no patience for the man he grew up into. He thinks he’s tiresome, and paranoid, and boring.

And Eddie wants to make the right choices—the safe choices. After all those years where he did nothing but frantically defend a life he never did anything with, he feels like real happiness could be within arm’s reach. So his instinct is to lock it down, secure it, and protect it. But the man capable of that insurance—the man he was out of habit—might not be capable of long-term happiness. Eddie doesn’t know how to be the kid who could eat his cake and the man who could have it too.

The last time he felt truly confident in his choices was that _if you believe it does_ moment down in Its lair. And that wasn’t really a choice, it was a necessity—it was believe he could kill monsters, or die. So he yelled _beep beep, motherfucker!_ and threw the spear and defended those he loves. And he was so sure that it worked!

And then It killed him.

Stan would understand, Eddie thinks. Stan understood what he meant the moment he said _the sunk-cost fallacy_. But Richie doesn’t work from numbers and algorithms and statistically probability. He _could_ , he’s smart enough to understand, but it’s not his style. Not his language.

So Eddie changes his tactics once more and says seriously: “Whenever life gets you down, Mrs. Brown—”

Immediately Richie’s expression sharpens, turns eager. He points like a hunting dog. He lifts his legs up off the arm of the chair and swings them around to the floor again.

The full force of Richie’s complete attention has always been intoxicating. He so rarely directs it at just one thing, usually split over two or three minor tasks or distractions. Eddie remembers being younger and snapping, _Richie, are you listening to me?!_ and Richie turning his face toward him with a challenge behind his eyes; and Eddie immediately thought _whoops, that was a mistake_. Too much for someone as little and gray and insignificant as Eddie sometimes felt to handle.

But Richie doesn’t think so. He keeps looking at Eddie anyway.

“And things seem hard or tough,” he goes on matter-of-factly, “and people are stupid, obnoxious, or daft—”

“ _Dahft_ , Eddie baby,” Richie corrects, leaning into the British accent and smiling through it.

The pet name makes Eddie blush—so close to being the exact wrong thing to say, but just enough to leave him off-kilter. He reaches for his preferred comfort: arguing with Richie. “I’m not doing a Voice.”

“I’ll do literally anything you want right now if you do a Voice for me,” Richie says, _ravenous_ curiosity on his face. “And I am not putting limits on that, I am using ‘literal’ in its dictionary definition.”

Eddie considers the implications of that for a moment and feels the prickling blush on his face intensify. Oh jeez. Eddie was wrong: he did not, in fact, know how Richie was going to react to this. He vastly underestimated Richie’s response, and somehow in this intensity his delight is just as intimidating as his anger.

He issues his demands in an itemized task list. “I want you to help me clean my incisions, make me bacon, and wait outside while I take a shower without breaking down the bathroom door,” he says. It helps to be specific with Richie. The less material he has, the less there is to grab and run with.

“Mmm, that’s three things,” Richie says, now blatantly enjoying himself. There’s something wolfish about the eager tilt of his chin, the width of his eyes. “If you want me to do three things, you’re gonna have to sing the whole song.”

“I don’t _know_ the whole song, and I have a _hole_ in my chest, I’m not singing.”

“You sang for Mike!”

“Yeah, and Stan offered us ten thousand dollars,” Eddie says. That’s not the order of the cause and effect, but Richie will find the joke funnier that way.

“You want ten thousand dollars? Ten thousand dollars, you better do anything _I_ want, and I’m not putting limitations on that either.” His eyebrows lift and fall once—a single pump is technically not a lascivious wiggle, but he’s on thin fucking ice.

“You can’t afford me.”

Richie sits up straight like he’s caught a scent. “So there’s a price.”

“If you have to ask, you can’t afford it. Richie,” he says, trying to secure his attention again before Eddie’s totally out of his depth. He takes a shallow breath and breaks eye contact, looking down at his knees so he can say more than sing, _“So remember, when you’re feeling very small and insecure, how amazingly unlikely is your birth.”_

Richie comes out of his chair.

Reflexively Eddie leans back: Richie is large and he can move _fast_ when he wants to. “Three things,” he says quickly. “I want three things—”

Richie puts one knee on the coffee table and leans across it entirely.

“Oh _fuck_ ,” Eddie says with feeling, and surrenders himself to be kissed.

It’s good. Richie is good at kissing, which is both rude of him and somehow unsurprising. Eddie hasn’t kissed many people in his life, and Richie’s definitely his favorite, so he might be a little biased. But Richie brings a lot of enthusiasm to everything he does, and this is no exception.

He’s actually kneeling across the table right now, in a way that Eddie knows can’t be easy, but he brings one hand up to cup Eddie’s cheek and kisses him so frantically that Eddie has to immediately give up on worrying about Richie’s knees and where the cantaloupe ended up. He’s under a charm offensive. Richie pushes into it, jaw nudging up against Eddie’s chin like he can go _through_ him, occupy the same space he does, defy the laws of physics. Eddie reaches up and holds his shoulders, half to steady him and half because he has to hang on. Parts of his mouth are more sensitive than others, he finds. Richie devotes equal attention to the point of his upper lip and the corner of his mouth, pulling little sensitive shocks out of him. He moves his lips and Eddie knows he’s trying to coax his mouth open. He resists just a little, thinking about coffee and beer and cantaloupe—and then he decides that he doesn’t care about that after all. He grabs one side of Richie’s head and pushes back into it, letting him in.

Richie draws in a breath. His fingers fold against his palm, against Eddie’s cheek. He kisses Eddie once, fiercely, and then relaxes a little. Trying to calm him down.

Eddie doesn’t want to be calmed down now that he’s riled up. “Oh, fuck you, you started it,” he says as he breaks away. He keeps his eyes closed.

“ _You_ started it, I’m stopping it before I end up in your lap,” Richie says, voice too tart for someone who was just kissing Eddie more passionately than anyone else has in his life. He _flings_ that mental image at Eddie carelessly.

Eddie hadn’t really considered it—he figures that Richie is larger than him, and weighs more, and if anyone ends up sitting in anyone else’s lap it’ll probably be him in Richie’s. But now that he imagines it—how heavy he’d feel, how Eddie would have to lean back to make room for him on the couch, the dip of Richie’s head as he leaned down—

Eddie opens his eyes. Richie’s still holding his face. His lips are strawberry bright from crushing up against Eddie’s. Eddie has to raise his gaze from his mouth, thinking, _my eyes are up here_.

Richie’s eyes widen and his mouth twists in a grimace. “Oh, _fuck_ , I forgot you’re high.” He releases Eddie’s cheek and draws back, hands coming down on the table and levering himself back off of it.

The sudden change in tone is jarring. Eddie tries to get his bearings. His mouth still tingles.

“If you apologize to me,” he says, trying to convey to him exactly how serious he is about this, “we’re never doing that again.”

Richie stands up with a muted _“ow, ow, ow.”_ When he’s on his feet again, he demands, “What’s with the ultimatums today?”

He tilts his head, cracks his neck, rolls his shoulders. Eddie watches him thinking, Richie’s big, Richie was never any good in gym class. He worries a little bit about his back and his aches and pains, and then he tries to quell that particular Sonia-esque instinct.

Then Richie tilts his head and looks sidelong at Eddie, still on the couch. The corner of his mouth twitches up, teasing. “You don’t mean it, anyway.”

Incensed, Eddie raises his eyebrows. “Excuse me?” he demands, his voice climbing to show exactly how much he meant it.

“Gladly,” Richie says easily.

Eddie pushes forward. “Hey, jackass, if I’m sober enough to bitch-slap you back to Connecticut right now, I can decide if I want to be kissing you. Come over here and let me demonstrate.” He holds up the flat of his hand like a paddle.

Richie, of course, looks just delighted. “I won’t apologize to you,” he says, his smile getting wider and turning even more crooked. There’s a focus to his eyes, a knowingness. “I just don’t think you could keep your hands off me.” His tone is innocent, almost sweet.

Eddie waits for three long seconds while he considers what exactly Richie just said, the fucking _tease_. And he _knows_ that Eddie can’t do anything about it. It’s so fucking unfair—Richie can be mean when he wants to. Even when he loves you, he can be mean.

_Well, so can I,_ Eddie thinks.

“Three things,” he reiterates. “Bandages. Bacon.” For the hell of the alliteration, he says, “Not breaking down the bathroom door.” He stares pointedly at Richie.

“You didn’t sing the whole song,” Richie points out.

“It’s full of science jargon, if I remembered the whole thing I’d be an astronomer,” Eddie says. “And you’re gonna do what I want anyway.”

Richie laughs. It’s a real laugh, genuine pleasure. He thinks Eddie’s funny. “Oh, am I?”

Eddie stands up from the couch, abandoning his cantaloupe. He tries to mimic Richie’s confident, faux-innocent tone as best as he can in a single syllable. “Yeah.”

And then he walks down the hall without bothering to see if Richie follows. It’s less the power walk he’d prefer and more of an old woman’s wounded shuffle, but he tries to be bossy about it. That’s always come easily to him.

And Richie does follow. Instead of making the house tremble with his loud steps—like Richie never got used to his size after his growth spurt either—he’s oddly quiet. Like he’s drifting along in Eddie’s wake.

Eddie enters the bathroom and gives the counter a once-over, making sure that all of the supplies are there: gloves, wipes, Dial soap, gauze pads, fresh bandages, Ziploc bags. In his peripheral vision he sees Richie appear in the doorway, peering in almost hesitantly.

Does he think that Eddie’s going to banish him from the room? Eddie told him what he wanted, and Richie is here, presumably to provide that. But—Eddie lifts his gaze to check his expression—the look on his face is as hesitant as his posture as he hovers in front of the door.

Eddie turns and goes up on his tiptoes, then sits down on the counter. He scoots back a little bit and then looks expectantly at Richie, making it clear that he’s waiting.

Richie blinks back at him, apparently not understanding this _ready_ position. “Yes, Drill Sergeant Kaspbrak?”

Eddie tilts his head in the direction of the sink. “Wash your hands,” he says. “Please.”

“Oh, _please_ ,” Richie echoes. There’s something mocking about it. Like he doesn’t think Eddie’s sincere. Like Eddie doesn’t have good manners—better manners, in fact, than Richie himself most of the time.

It helps when Richie provides a challenge for Eddie to rise to. “You talk a lot, but do you listen?” he asks coolly.

And Richie _blushes_.

At first Eddie’s not sure if it’s actually happening, but then Richie swallows and the slight bob of his Adam’s apple calls attention to his throat, and the flush creeping up from the collar of his crewneck T-shirt. The corners of his mouth deepen and turn down.

“What, are you trying to reverse psychology me into bossing me around?” he asks. He seems to try to smile, but it looks more like he’s just showing his teeth.

The blush is interesting. Whatever it means, Eddie has him off-balance. It reminds him of Richie at the restaurant, when Eddie said _you’re going to beg me to give you rabies_ , which was a stupid throwaway joke but it got Richie flustered enough he put his head down and said _don’t look at me_.

Eddie doesn’t actually want to make Richie beg in this bathroom. He doesn’t think he’s capable of that. But what he wants is to feel… in control of whatever this is between them. He might not be able to control the way he responds to Richie, he might not be able to do anything about it, but there’s a chance he can turn it back on him. Make him feel as awash in _want_ as he does.

“Rich,” he says, knowing that Richie knows him, knowing that Richie will _listen_. “Come here.”

Richie hesitates. Eddie never thought of himself as scary, but Richie looks unsure; and Eddie doubts himself, immediately backtracking. He’s pushed too hard, he’s smothering Richie, he’s just like his mother but Richie’s not like Eddie, he has the strength to walk away when people are unreasonable with him.

But then Richie moves forward—one bare foot and then the other—as slowly as though he’s in a dream. It looks less like a conscious decision and more like a magnetic draw. If he were less steady it would be a lurch, might remind Eddie of the shambling horrors of Derry. But instead it’s Richie. Big, blunt, loud Richie, who has never said anything he wouldn’t scream, and nothing about himself that he wouldn’t laugh at. There’s nothing insidious about him.

He steps closer to Eddie and Eddie lifts his chin, tilts his head back a little bit so that he can meet Richie’s eyes. Richie’s lips are slightly parted. Slowly he sets both hands on the counter on either side of Eddie’s hips. He’s close enough that his warmth colors the air around them.

The _size_ of him is fascinating. If it were anyone else Eddie might feel trapped; but Richie feels like something to lean on, large and supportive. There’s no confinement between his body and the countertop, just comfort. If Eddie were to lean forward into Richie’s chest, he could close his eyes and press his cheek into Richie’s shoulder. Not because he’s tired—he’s not, he feels almost _electrified_ —but just to feel him.

And if _Richie_ were to lean forward all the way, he could flatten Eddie against the mirror.

With this image in mind, Eddie leans up and touches his lips to Richie’s. It’s barely a kiss, not the way Eddie has needed it before. Richie hardly moves in response, just lets Eddie rub his lips sideways across his, soft and a little chapped. The friction is delicious, seems to sear its way straight down into Eddie’s chest. His heart thumps.

Richie says nothing. He doesn’t push to kiss him properly, he doesn’t crack a joke to break the tension, he just stands very close and breathes steadily. When Eddie breaks the kiss and pulls back, he blinks down at him. His eyes look large and soft, without their usual wicked sharpness.

He looks like Richie still comfortable on the chair, barefoot in his pajamas, head clearly in the clouds. Eddie likes Richie without his armor on.

He takes his hands by the wrists, pulls them gently up from the counter, and brings them to the zipper on his sweatshirt. Richie’s lips flatten into a white line and then relax, color filling back in. Eddie waits for him to take hold of the pull tab, but he doesn’t.

Instead he quietly asks, “Why?”

After Eddie wiped out on Silver, Richie turned the stitches check into a tease. They’d just kissed for the first time, and he was smug and confident and knowing. He was careful when he lifted Eddie’s arm and ran his hand up his ribs, turning humiliation into a flirtation like it was nothing at all. _Take your shirt off for what, Eddie? Because you want me to look at you? Because you want me to touch you?_

“Because you want to,” Eddie says.

For a moment they remain still, just looking at each other. Richie’s chest rises and falls with his breaths, quiet and deep. If he were a little less steady, he might be panting. He’s warm, and doesn’t smell of anything in particular—just _warm_ and _alive_. Eddie waits for his fingers to tighten on the pull tab of the zipper.

Richie swallows; the little click in his throat is perfectly audible in the quiet bathroom. Eddie sort of anticipates what he’s going to sound like—low and gravelly and wanting—so it’s a surprise when he asks in a smaller pained voice, “Is that all?”

Like Eddie’s let him down somehow.

Eddie looks at him, bewildered. He wants Richie to kiss him again, take from him whatever reassurance he needs, because Eddie will give it without hesitation. He just doesn’t understand what Richie’s looking for. The lights above the mirror behind him throw shine into Richie’s eyes; Eddie can see a phantom of his own confused reflection in Richie’s glasses.

“What?” he asks. He tries to make his voice gentle, but he already knows that he stepped wrong somewhere in that last exchange, which makes him unsteady.

Another faint little sound as Richie swallows again. “Just—I mean, I’m not gonna…” He sighs; Eddie feels the billow of it over his jaw and throat. Tenser, Richie says, “Look, you need me to do a lot of things, I don’t want you to think that I’m…” What looks like anger slips through and Richie turns his head away. He needs to shave; the shadow of stubble is creeping over his sharp jaw. Eddie wants to scrape his own cheek against it.

Eddie liked him teasing, joking about Eddie being unable to keep his hands to himself. He doesn’t know what to do with a Richie who is looking at all of Eddie’s wordless cues and going _Are you sure?_ And he doesn’t like being second-guessed.

“Richie,” he says. It comes out more certain, which is a relief; he feels it when his words catch Richie and make him turn back to look at him.

He has a sense of Richie’s fragility here—he thinks about broken glasses, though he’s not sure why. He squeezes tighter with his right hand on Richie’s and feels a little buzzing pulse from his radial nerve in response, but Richie’s pupils _dilate_ in response, black against marginally lighter brown, visible only because of the lights behind him.

Eddie swallows and makes himself say it. “Take my shirt off. Please.”

This time Richie doesn’t quibble over Eddie’s _please_. His focus flicks from one of Eddie’s eyes to the other, and then drops for a moment to Eddie’s mouth. For a moment Eddie thinks he’s going to kiss him and that electric current rises up across his skin in anticipation— _yes_ , it would smooth the way, make Eddie so much more certain, _please, Richie_.

But then Richie lowers his eyes and pulls the front of Eddie’s sweatshirt away from his body, so that the placket isn’t lying directly on Eddie’s chest. He pulls down, and Eddie, still holding the backs of his hands, feels the shift of the tension across his torso and hears the quiet little click of the metal teeth pulling apart. Richie’s throat bobs; his lips tighten and then relax.

Watching him do it is an ache like pain, but Eddie neither flinches into nor away from it. He listens. He almost counts the teeth as he hears the zipper creak open. He watches Richie’s face, looking for… he doesn’t know what. The moment when Richie raises his eyes to his? It doesn’t come. Richie keeps his eyes on his task, and he breathes steadily through his nose, and his skin is hot and dry on Eddie’s palms. Eddie worries that his hands might start sweating. His heart thrills in his chest, tripping along anxiously.

The counter is steady under him, but the thing that this reminds Eddie of is that moment after he leapt from the top of the cliff in the quarry. He did it because he wanted Richie to think he was brave, and by the time his body’s fear caught up to him—a moment of _holy shit, what the fuck?_ exemplified by Richie’s own incredulous shout—it didn’t matter. There was nothing to worry about, nothing he could do about it in the moment of freefall.

That’s how it is. Provoking Richie feels like freefall, a bit. Maximum velocity. Eddie could pull the ripcord—could reach up and kiss him on the mouth and make this determinedly one thing and not the other.

The fact that he can do this at all, though—sit with this sweet nervousness—makes him feel like the kind of person he wants Richie to think he is. It feels a lot like bravery. So Eddie waits and watches, and if something tugs at the corners of his mouth—a smile he could let forward if he wanted to—it’s only because he feels good. But he can keep that to himself.

The zipper sticks when Richie brings it to the end of the track. Richie’s head lifts for a moment but he catches himself quickly, a flash of eye contact there and gone again in less than a second. Eddie looks down at their joined hands.

The problem is that Richie is being so gentle with the zipper that it doesn’t want to come apart. A joke sits on Eddie’s tongue: _come on, Trashmouth, put your back into it._

But the goad stays where it is. Instead Eddie adjusts his grip on Richie’s hands, taking firmer hold; some of his fingers wrap around to Richie’s palms, feeling the thicker padding there. Richie basically works in theater; how can he have hands like this? Eddie imagines him kneading a stress ball, sitting at a desk somewhere—just Richie transplanted directly into Eddie’s office, looking bored half-obscured behind a computer monitor—and the way that the tendon in his forearm would flex.

He does not allow himself to look for it. Instead he jerks down, pulling Richie’s hand with him. Richie draws in a short sharp breath through his nose. The zipper comes apart as it is designed to.

Satisfied, Eddie looks back up at Richie to find that Richie is looking back at him, looking a little stunned. He waits for Richie to say something—something about micromanaging, something about puppets, something about Eddie being bossy. But he doesn’t. He looks a little flushed, actually—he’s so pale, and the color is visible high up on his cheeks. Eddie wants to rub his thumb there, feel the apple of Richie’s habitual smile and draw a line straight down where he’ll develop smile lines to the bristle of scruff on his jaw. He’s never wanted to touch someone so pointlessly before, not for any purpose, just to feel it.

“You good?” Eddie asks.

Richie blinks once, almost nonchalantly. “Fine,” he says. It’s very quiet and throaty. It’s also exactly what Eddie wanted to hear earlier.

Eddie has to smile at that. “Okay,” he says. He lets go of Richie’s hands, sliding his own back expectantly over the juts of Richie’s wrist bones. The hair on his arms ruffles back against the grain.

Richie blinks again, his eyes widening slightly, one corner of his mouth pulling back crookedly. That one irregular incisor sits like a troublemaker between its fellows. Eddie’s heart thumps a little harder. Richie’s teeth are cute. Eddie’s _so_ far gone. Then Richie scrapes his teeth over his lower lip and drops his gaze to Eddie’s chest once more, shaking his head just slightly.

Eddie wants to demand _What?_ but he’s not mad. He knows that look on Richie—the Richie who knows Eddie’s having fun and is going along with it. He feels like he’s flushing all over his body; he holds on to the hard edge of the counter.

Richie pushes his hands into the shoulders of Eddie’s sweatshirt and carefully lifts it away from his arms. There’s an audible shushing sound as the fuzzy lining brushes against the cloth of the shirt.

“Hey, nice shirt,” Richie says, a smile in his voice.

“Thanks,” Eddie says.

“What is this—upcycling? You buy oversize clothes cheap from thrift shops and cut them down and make them look fashionable?”

Eddie sort of wants to kick him, but not really; he hooks one ankle around Richie’s calf, letting his heel drum against the muscle there. He wants to tilt his head forward and rest it on Richie’s chest, but he has to give the man room to work.

“I don’t buy at thrift shops,” he says. Richie guides his hands back and down, pulling the sweatshirt away from Eddie’s body. The lizard shirt has short sleeves, so when he gets clear he skims his hands down the bare parts of Eddie’s arms, all the way down to the backs of his hands on the countertop. Eddie shivers. Richie, the bastard, keeps his poker face. “If you can afford a shirt that fits, just get it tailored.”

“I couldn’t afford a shirt that fit in college.”

“No, because you—” _Rocketed up and then across,_ he almost says, but fortunately he isn’t able to put into words the magnitude of the growth spurt Richie must have gone through to end up the way he is now. That’s part of why Eddie likes wearing his shirts, to be honest—the shoulders don’t sit right on his smaller frame, and there’s plenty of give around Eddie’s injury where Richie’s barrel chest would normally fill it, and it reminds him of how big and square Richie is. But he remembers the shirt that Richie put on last night, how tight it was, the lines of tension spreading from the buttons outwards. He stares at Richie’s t-shirt, at the cuff of his sleeve around his bicep, because he’s afraid that Richie will catch the _want_ in his face.

“I what?”

“You don’t buy normal shirts!” Eddie says, as though this is the problem, as though there could be anything objectionable about the plain black t-shirt that Richie’s wearing right now except for the fact that it’s a little indecent.

“Of course not,” Richie says. Eddie can hear the way that his grin changes the shapes of his words. He scowls at Richie’s bicep.

Then Richie reaches for his buttons. Eddie’s not buttoned all the way to his throat, he has two open, but he has to lift his chin a little bit just when Richie’s hands brush against his collarbone. Richie is a parody of concentration, the point of his tongue resting on his lower lip as he focuses on his task, deftly slipping first one button from its hole and then moving down to the other. Eddie stares at the faint contrast—Richie’s still-swollen lower lip, slightly darker than the pink muscle poking out of his mouth. Something like hunger squeezes in his stomach.

“You okay?” Richie asks without looking up at him.

“Yeah,” Eddie says, too quickly.

Richie smiles and there’s a flash of white tooth for just a second before he returns to serious business. The dedication he’s applying to the task would be more appropriate for defusing a bomb than for taking Eddie’s clothes off. Eddie is not fooled. The further Richie unbuttons him, the more the shirt gapes, the greater the stripe of his chest is revealed by the open V. In his peripheral vision Eddie can see the whiteness of his bandage, but Richie’s eyes don’t linger on it. He pays undue attention to each button as he undoes it, and moves on, and then he takes hold of the very bottom of Eddie’s shirt. The edge of his finger brushes across the silky material of the running shorts, and Eddie feels the fabric shift across the top of his thigh. _Just_ his thigh.

Eddie thinks clearly _DO NOT GET HARD_ and wonders if he may have bitten off more than he can chew, just as Richie looks up at him. The smirk is tucked into the corner of Richie’s mouth, lying in wait, but otherwise Richie’s eyes are innocent. It’s infuriating—the same old game that Richie used to play, riling Eddie up, making him bristle and flare his nostrils and shriek with outrage at Richie while Richie laughed at him.

He doesn’t take the bait. “Did you forget how buttons work?” he asks.

Richie’s mouth opens as he laughs silently, and pushes Eddie’s shirt off of his shoulders. He pulls the same trick again, running his hands down over Eddie’s biceps. His hands are warm and the bathroom is cold—Eddie is cold all the time, and somehow constantly sweating—and gooseflesh rises in his wake. Richie doesn’t even bother pulling the shirt all the way off, just lets it rest where it falls in the crooks of Eddie’s elbows and at the small of his back. He doesn’t _undress_ Eddie, he leaves him in the state of being undressed, open shirt wreathed around him.

There’s nothing functional about it. Eddie sits on the counter, more rumpled than he’s ever allowed himself to be seen, feeling indulgent and luxurious somehow. He’s cold enough that his exposed nipples pucker, but as long as his dick stays out of sight Eddie figures he can live with that.

The interesting thing is that it’s also clearly a move to put Eddie on display, and there’s no audience here but Richie. So Eddie can only assume that Richie wants to look at him like this. Despite the bandages, despite their earlier argument, despite the utter unsexiness of the medical necessity—Richie still licks his lower lip as he turns away toward the sink.

Something almost indignant rises in Eddie when Richie looks away from him without commenting—or _touching_. But if he complains about it first—if he _breaks_ and grabs for Richie and kisses him like he wants to… Well, that’s no different than anything else they’ve been doing. He liked Richie suddenly _having_ to kiss him, just because Eddie quoted some old Monty Python. But it would be nice to get Richie responding like that to something that’s just Eddie, and not anyone else’s parroted words. Eddie can write his own material.

Richie turns the tap and starts washing his hands. Eddie watches and judges him through the whole process, and at one point Richie turns his head and catches his suspicious eye and starts singing “Happy Birthday” aloud, grinding his nails into his palms, doing butterfly motions with his knuckles. Richie has nice hands, and that’s kind of rude of him too. Nice hands, good kisser—Eddie hooks one ankle behind the other to keep himself from idly kicking at Richie or something, just for something to think about that isn’t the amazing unlikeliness of Richie Tozier.

Richie scrubs all the way up to his elbows, and then he has to lean forward so that he can rinse his forearms in the sink too. From Eddie’s angle he can see the straight neat line of spine all the way down his back, forming a faint valley between muscle and fat.

Richie straightens and reaches for the box of blue nitrile gloves. As he shakes one out, he asks, “We gonna need more of these?”

Eddie’s a little disappointed by the reminder of such mundane concerns. His current stocks won’t hold all the way through the week until they have to return to Bangor, but he doesn’t want to think about that or about grocery shopping right now. It was better when he was just here in the room with Richie, without his consciousness split thinking toward the next thing he has to do.

“Yeah,” he says, and figures that’s the end of it.

Richie is theatrical as always as he pulls on the glove, snapping the cuff at his wrist and waggling his fingers a little sinisterly. Eddie wrinkles his nose—Mad Scientists and Evil Doctors have always unsettled him. Richie’s face relaxes immediately, settling back into casual instead of character.

“We starting front or back?” Richie asks.

Eddie considers. He doesn’t, strictly speaking, need Richie’s help with the front incision. He can manage that himself, even if his hands are a little clumsier than he’d like them to be. This is normally when he does his check-ins of his incisions—feeling for unnatural heat that might signify infection, or anything unusual. And he doesn’t like the idea of Richie looking at him not to flirt, but to check how his bruises are healing.

He wets his lips before he speaks, trying to deal with his nervousness. “You can start with the front one,” he says. “If you don’t mind.”

It’s not exactly the drill sergeant that Richie accused him of being, but Eddie doesn’t think he can manage anything more assertive than that. If Richie declined politely—pulled a face or raised an eyebrow at him—Eddie would withdraw the request immediately.

Maybe that’s why Eddie seems incapable of finding Richie disgusting, no matter how he snorts or shoves his bony feet in Eddie’s lap. Maybe his standards have just shifted to accommodate recovery from severe injury, which comes with a lot of discomfort that would have sent the Eddie from before Mike called into hysterics. Healing is somehow more disgusting than injury, and the process drags out so much longer.

“Okay,” Richie says easily, apparently unbothered. He takes a step closer and stands just between Eddie’s knees. Eddie’s leg touches his thigh, his bare skin on the fuzzy material of the pajama pants. “Lean back a little?”

Eddie slides his hands back from the edge of the counter, lifting his chest. It feels absurdly like he’s pointing his nipples at Richie and waiting for him to comment, which is a mental image so funny that his mouth wobbles as he tries to keep from laughing at it.

Richie catches it. “What?”

“Would you rather have—?” Eddie starts, and then breaks before he can get all the way through it. He loses his good posture and has to hold his ribs, and Richie starts laughing too. Eddie pitches forward and has to lean on Richie to stay upright, his forehead planted on Richie’s shoulder for stability. “Okay, okay,” Eddie gasps when it starts to hurt, sitting up again.

“Okay,” Richie says. “Jeez.” And he takes hold of Eddie’s shoulders with his rubbery gloved hands and tilts him backward, adjusting him into a position with better light. Eddie loses his breath a little, but he’s able to blame it on the laughing fit. Richie doesn’t look up into his face, just keeps looking at his chest, and then he scratches gently at one of the upper corners of the bandage with his thumbnail from inside the glove. He glances up into Eddie’s face again. “This okay?”

“Fine,” Eddie says, nonplussed. It’s not the first time that Richie’s helped him with the bandages.

Richie picks a little harder, peeling a little triangle loose from Eddie’s skin. The seal on the waterproof bandages is very good—a necessity because of the material—which means that it never wants to give up its grip on Eddie himself. This is fine up to a point, but it means that Richie literally cannot rib the bandage off, because the adhesive lies over the lines of the stitches.

Richie braces one hand in the center of the bandage, marking how far he wants to remove it in the first step. “Ready?” he asks.

This is the easy part. Eddie draws in a breath as far as he can, holds it, and nods.

Richie pulls. It sounds worse than it feels, tearing too quickly for Eddie’s nerve endings to do any more than reel in surprise no matter how many times they do this. That corner freed, Richie looks back up into Eddie’s face again, and Eddie lets out that breath and feels the uncertain stinging where his skin is exposed. He looks down to check, but his bruising is still so severe he can’t see if the bandage left a mark.

“This is gonna hurt,” Richie warns him.

Eddie is not impressed. He’s in pain basically all the time. For a moment he considers reaching out and gripping Richie’s shoulder for something to hold onto—ridiculous, it’s not like he’s biting a wooden spoon while a Civil War doctor saws his leg off—but he chickens out. Instead he unhooks his other ankle and then tentatively loops it around the back of Richie’s calf.

Richie’s eyebrows lift slightly, but he says nothing. Carefully, tenderly, he chivvies the edge of the bandage away, while Eddie holds his breath. There’s some unavoidable pressing on bruises, and some deeper pain when he puts pressure on the incision and Eddie hisses between his teeth. “Sorry, sorry,” Richie says quickly. He pulls the bandage clear of the stitches and then says, “Quick one, ready?” and yanks the rest of it free.

Eddie sucks in a deep breath, more out of relief than anything else. Richie drops the bandage in a Ziploc bag—which is not exactly proper containment of biohazards, but it’s better than nothing, and at least they won’t touch it that way. Carefully, instinctively, Eddie raises both hands to his chest and rests them on his ribs.

“Hurts?” Richie asks.

“It’s so fucking itchy,” Eddie complains. The adhesive sticks to his skin and he has to remove it carefully with hot water and Dial soap, which isn’t exactly effective; and he used to have at least _some_ chest hair, but he’s pretty sure they shaved him for the surgery and it’s growing back in irregular in the places where scar tissue doesn’t overtake it.

“Can I get you a tub of ice cream for your chest?” Richie asks dryly.

Eddie briefly imagines being in one of those tubs of ice that you see football players resting in in sports movies. He weighs how cold he is all the time against how annoying it is to constantly want to scratch his injuries. Eventually the impracticality of sending Richie out to buy a bathtub’s worth of ice wins out.

“Maybe later,” he says.

“Can I get that in writing?”

Eddie sticks his tongue out at him. It’s not a mature or intelligent response, but it does make Richie laugh.

Cleaning the incisions is still unpleasant, even when he’s not the one doing it. For one thing, he’d much rather bury his face in Richie’s shirt and inhale his warm smell instead of the stink of antiseptic wipes and old blood. For another, the antiseptic wipes are cold, and while they don’t _sting_ properly, he’s aware that he _should_ feel pain. The space where the pain should be feels reminiscent of his childhood fear of hurting himself, back before he broke his arm and realized it was just a letdown. At one point Richie actually rests the palm of his other hand on Eddie’s side under his ribs and that makes Eddie twitch harder than anything else has so far.

Richie looks up. “You good?” he asks, concern clear in the tight corners of his eyes.

Eddie’s thinking about how nice it would be if Richie spread out his big hand a little more and maybe sank his fingers in. “Fine,” he says.

Richie throws the antiseptic wipes in the Ziploc with the bandage. “Okay.” He taps at Eddie’s hip—casual, proprietary—and takes a step back. “Hop down.”

Eddie slides down from the counter, turns around, and catches sight of his reflection. “Oh,” he says before he can stop himself.

He forgot about the hickeys. Which means that it’s the first real look he’s gotten at himself, half naked and wearing Richie’s shirt like a shawl draped around his elbows, two ripe bruises resting plum-red on his throat, right where he asked Richie to put them. Richie himself stands behind him, so much broader that Eddie’s body does nothing to eclipse him. Eddie’s vision narrows—border of black around the love bites. For a moment he thinks he’s fainting again and he doesn’t understand why or how, but he can hear his pulse in his ears and his rushing breath like the ocean.

“Ground control to Major Eds,” Richie says.

Eddie lifts his eyes to Richie’s reflection and sees the concern twisting his brow. One of his hands comes up and Eddie thinks _God, he’s going to touch me,_ and he doesn’t know what to do with the roar of emotion that dredges up, longing twined up in inexplicable fear. But Richie hesitates, hand closing into a fist and drawing back towards himself.

“You okay?” he asks. “You got all squirrely.”

Eddie takes a breath. His lungs don’t want to empty all the way; his body wants him breathing shallowly, and he has to overrule it and take deep breaths and feel his chest ache in response.

“Fine,” Eddie says. “I’m fine.” He almost adds, _Stood up too fast_ , but he doesn’t want Richie thinking he’s fragile. The turtle shirt now feels like a barrier, and he grimaces as he twists his shoulders to climb out of it one sleeve at a time and set it on the counter next to the hoodie. He rests the heels of his hands on the countertop.

“Sorry, guess it was your normal level of squirreliness,” Richie quips.

“I’m not squirrely,” Eddie insists.

“Sure you are. Little guy, big dark eyes, likes nuts.”

Eddie processes this, comprehends the innuendo, and stares determinedly at the speckles in the countertop so that he doesn’t have to think about how he’s so in love with this idiot who compares him to a rodent and makes nutsack jokes.

“Rabid,” Richie adds helpfully.

“You’re the one with squirrel teeth,” Eddie shoots back.

Richie gives a short whistle and Eddie feels him scratching lightly at the posterior bandage. “That’s how you got it. You were bit by a squirrel, and you turned into one.” The clicking sound seems to indicate that he’s gnashing his teeth.

Eddie looks up, but not to see Richie’s physical comedy. Instead he looks at the hickeys. One is darker than the other, broken blood vessels dusting the purple with red speckles.

“I like your teeth,” he says stupidly, and then shuts his eyes because he can’t believe he just said that out loud.

Richie, as ever, can’t pass up a punchline. His hand slides across Eddie’s back, his gloved palm warm even with the barriers between them. He applies light pressure there, fingertips resting on the knobs of Eddie’s spine.

“I remember,” he says, voice low and husky again.

Something in Eddie’s chest _flips_ , and Eddie barely has time to think about it before Richie _yanks_. It startles him so badly that he jerks in place and Richie has to steady him.

“Gotcha, gotcha,” Richie says. “Sorry, I should have warned you.”

“You’re a complete bastard,” Eddie says. It’s quitter’s talk, meaning that Richie has won the game by getting him to break first, but to be fair, he’s dealing with a lot of conflicting stimuli right now.

Richie’s hand slides a little lower on his back and his expression in the mirror is a little smug. “Don’t forget it,” he says. “Hang on, this part’s gonna hurt.”

* * *

Ideally, Eddie would like to put on one of his new shirts. Maybe even the one with the roses on it that Richie picked out for him, as a way of compromising with the parts of himself that _really_ likes walking around wearing evidence that he’s Richie Tozier’s favorite person and that want reminding that he’s an adult man capable of wearing clothing that fits. But they need to be washed first, and he’s pretty sure that shirts go from the manufacturer to the store with some kind of finish on them to keep them in good condition when people try them on, so he needs to wash them before he can wear them. Especially over broken skin.

And even if he were to put on a clean shirt, he’s also currently airing his incisions. He doesn’t want to ruin a new shirt with any fluids that might leak out of his wounds. He even considers taking a nap on the couch without a shirt on at all—Richie wanders around shirtless often enough—but the idea of the leather sticking to his bare skin is repulsive, and the idea of Richie looking at his incisions still makes him uncomfortable. If, for medical reasons, he can’t force Richie to pretend that the injuries don’t exist at all, he’d rather cover them when he doesn’t have to deal with them directly.

So Eddie puts on one of Richie’s shirts, sets the Macy’s bag with his new clothes in his empty laundry basket, and nudges it out to the living room with his foot. It is a more athletic process than he expected, requiring him to brace himself on the wall going down the hallway and take several breaks. When he emerges, feeling triumphant, and pushes the basket out towards the couch, he finds Richie standing in the office holding a package of sliced meat. Woodie the wooden giraffe has apparently given up the ghost and is lying prostrate at Goldie’s feet, though Richie seems not to have noticed this at all.

“I have bad news,” Richie says.

Eddie’s stomach immediately tightens with the thought that _oh god, something we ate went bad, we’re going to get botulism_.

“We’re out of bacon,” Richie says. “What we do have is—” He lifts the package higher. “—‘thin ham slices,’ which I think is a way of trying to sell Canadian bacon to American jingoists.”

Of course Richie’s forty years old and works as a comedian, and he still remembers their eighth grade social studies vocabulary words. And he uses them correctly. Eddie knows that he’s tired and that this isn’t actually frustration that he’s feeling, it’s his exhaustion taking something new and exceptional about Richie and wanting to make a joke out of it. He sits down on the couch and blinks hard, wondering if he’s even going to be able to stay awake long enough to have second breakfast.

“How is that different from lunchmeat?” he asks.

Richie lowers the ham slice packaging so that he can squint down at it through his glasses. “You know… That’s the first thing I would want to clarify if I were selling thin ham slices. ‘How is this different from chipped ham?’ Well, first I would start by selling it as _Canadian bacon_ , because it’s clearly not American bacon. _Then_ I would say it’s thicker than chipped ham, so it’s a _medium_ -thin ham slice. But then we’d get all the complaints asking about whether these ham slices can contact your dead grandmother via a Ouija board and—” He interrupts himself and then frowns. “Is that anything?”

There’s something sort of plaintive about the way he’s asking. Eddie realizes slowly, as he connects the dots between _medium_ and _medium_ , that Richie is testing jokes. That he wants approval, but this is more specific than he’s ever asked Eddie for it before— _is that anything_?

Not all of Richie’s jokes are funny, but he’s always acted like he’s a cut up. Like he’s a comedic genius, he has dates in Reno, he doesn’t need Eddie’s approval.

But here he is, asking for it.

Eddie brings up both hands and massages the back of his neck. It’s a relief somehow to know that Richie needs something from Eddie as much as Eddie needs something from him.

“I like the Houston marine biologist better,” he admits.

Richie considers staring at the thin ham slices. “You think they eat Canadian bacon in Houston?”

“Do you think marine biologists eat fish?” Eddie returns.

Richie’s mouth twitches. “You’re right. They gotta have an alternative to dolphin, the other, other white meat.” Eddie cringes and Richie cackles. “No, man, you’re in medical school, I’m sure they let you eat a little piece of human at least once—”

“No they don’t!” Eddie thinks, utterly horrified at the idea that every doctor in the United States might be a secret cannibal. “That is not a thing!”

“It is too, it was on _American Idol_ once.”

_“What?”_ Eddie asks. “Why are you getting your medical advice from _American Idol_?”

“So do you think marine biologists in, like, marine biology school are like, here.” Richie lowers his chin and waggles his eyebrows and says, “For five thousand dollars I’ll let you taste the manatee.”

“You don’t have to kill and eat the manatee to taste the manatee,” Eddie says. “People do dumb shit in Florida constantly, I’m sure manatee licking is like their equivalent of… cow tipping.”

Richie lowers the ham slices and stares into the middle distance, which happens to be the window directly across from him. Quietly, as though experiencing a revelation, he asks, “What do you think happens when you try to tip a manatee?”

“Richie,” Eddie says. “Come back.”

Richie’s eyes focus and he turns a grin on Eddie. He waves the bacon. “You want some thin ham slices?”

“As long as they promise not to commune with the dead,” Eddie says. “Of any species.”

“Mmm, they might not want to concede that, but I’ll insist. Tell ’em that’s a non-negotiable and if they hold any séances in the frying pan, we’re out the fucking door.” Richie smiles hard enough that his right eye scrunches entirely shut and then ducks back into the kitchen.

Eddie lies down on the couch right where he is, bringing his knees up and then using his feet to push his torso toward the other end so he can stretch out. It makes him feel like a kid, incapable of using furniture correctly, but he doesn’t mind it. He doesn’t have his blanket, but he tucks his hands into the pocket of the hoodie and rests his head on a pillow.

Richie’s just… fun. Eddie can be anxious and needy and unfairly turned on, and being with Richie is still fun. Eddie can be bored and tired and resigned and Richie is still…

_Is that anything?_

It’s a lot, Eddie decides as he closes his eyes.

* * *

The dreamscape is all bare red-brown dirt, ripped raw of any grass and vegetation and then hard-baked over years of Maine precipitation. It makes Eddie think of the baseball diamond worn into the dirt behind the Tracker house after years and years of children’s feet. Sometimes people know the way to go and they gotta make the path themselves.

Eddie picks over the earth. None of it rises with his steps, which is good; he’s wearing Keds, not loafers, but they’re white. They’re kids’ shoes, and if his mother sees the dirt on them, not only will she know where he’s been (where he’s not supposed to go), she’ll lose her mind over the dangers of dirt. Maybe buy him new shoes.

Eddie doesn’t want her to buy him new shoes; shoe shopping with his mother is a nightmare. And Richie bought him these shoes.

He walks up to the first of the railroad tracks, carving long lines across the ground. He remembers how to check to see if a train’s coming—he puts his hand on the metal and feels for vibrations. There’s nothing. He steps over the track and walks across it.

The feeling _you should not be here_ rises with each step. Not just because he’s not allowed down by the trainyard, though his mother had her opinions about the kind of people there too. They were dirty—they were frequently homeless—and they were diseased, and Eddie thought a lot about that when he was a kid. But he ended up here exactly the same as any of them. Eddie Kaspbrak is officially one of the people down by the trainyard.

No, part of it is the sense of wrongness from being in Derry at all. He knows that he left Derry behind, barely with his life, and that there were plenty of people who didn’t. Derry almost managed to kill Stan from over thirteen-hundred miles away. Eddie’s aware of his narrow escape and what constitutes an acceptable risk, and this is not an acceptable risk. He doesn’t know why he’s here.

The train sails slowly into his field of vision. Nothing close enough to him to be dangerous, but he sees men standing in the open cars, and they see him. Eddie used to think, when he was a kid, that he might like to get a job being one of those men. He might like to wear clothes he didn’t have to worry about ruining, something heavy that could take regular wear and tear, and he might like to lift crates to make his back and arms strong, and he might like to trust that his body could do the work he put in front of it, and he might like to whistle _I’ve been workin’ on the raaaaaailroad, aaaaall the livelong day_ on his way home. He thinks he said something to that effect for one of the _what do you want to be when you grow up_ projects when he was in high school.

_That’s it?_ Richie asked him. He was bug-eyed behind his glasses and his front incisors had a nice big gap between them. Eddie sometimes found himself looking at that gap while Richie talked, and then he understood on some instinctive level that looking at other boys’ mouths while they talked was something you just didn’t do, the way that he didn’t make fun of Bill’s stutter or Stan’s precisely-lined pencils with their rubber grips on his desk. There were rules that Richie broke that Eddie would never dare to.

_Just wanna ride the rails, Eddie? Nothing big? Nothing glamorous? You don’t wanna drive racecars?_ Richie was disappointed in him, and Eddie hated when Richie was disappointed in him. It was almost as bad as Bill being disappointed in him, except Bill’s disappointment filled Eddie with shame and Richie’s disappointment made Eddie spitting mad, because Richie liked it when Eddie got mad and shouted at him, didn’t care when Eddie was rude.

_Well, what are you gonna be?_ Eddie asked. Recently the Amazing Ricardo had put on one of his unavoidable performances and the awkwardness of watching Richie melt down when his tricks didn’t go the way he wanted them to meant they were all gradually becoming aware that stage magic was probably not in Richie’s future.

Richie drew himself up to his full height, which was only beginning to threaten to be more than Eddie’s himself. _I,_ he said, _am going to be a famous ventriloquist. And I’m gonna travel the world, and people are gonna pay the big bucks to hear me talk, I’m gonna be the biggest in the business._

Eddie knew what ventriloquists were, but he didn’t think he’d ever heard of one. None that he’d consider famous—if he didn’t know them, how could they be famous. _You don’t pay money to see the ventriloquist,_ he said, because Richie had needled down his idea and now he had to return the favor. _You pay money to see the puppets. It wouldn’t be about you._

Richie looked at him contemplatively, and then, almost patiently, reached up and grabbed Eddie by the collar of his polo shirt and swung him into the grass. It startled him more than it hurt, because Richie hung on all the way down and stretched out the neck of his shirt horribly, and Eddie burst into furious tears not because Richie had pushed him down but because Richie thought about it so much before he did it. If it had been impulsive anger, he thinks he could have borne it, but it was that Richie made the choice.

For the rest of the week they had to stay inside for recess, not allowed out to play, and by the end Eddie still remembered that he had been mad at Richie but it mattered less and they were friends again, and thereafter sometimes trains and trainyards made their way into their playground games sometimes, the four of them hoisting imaginary bindles and scooping coal into an engine. Bill never asked where the idea came from, and Richie was happy to play the whistle, and Stan liked picking up sticks and marking out train tracks for them all to walk along, and Eddie never minded that Bill was always, unspoken, the conductor.

“Hey!” says one of the men on the train. He has a crate in his arms—it’s about the size of his whole chest, and he hoists it easily.

Eddie looks up at him, startled, and the man launches the crate at him. Eddie panics—is he meant to catch it?—but it falls just a few feet short in front of him and tumbles forward like a dice rolling on its edges. Between the planks he can see the dark brown almost black (like Richie’s eyes) shapes inside, the hard shells, the long whiskers and the beady eyes.

“There ya go, kid!” the man calls. “Take ’em home to yer mum! Compliments of the Southern-Fucking-Seacoast-Bound-for-Welfare Line!”

She’s been lurking in the back of his mind for as long as he’s been here, but the man invoking Sonia suddenly makes Eddie furious. It’s not like Eddie did anything in particular for these lobsters, it’s not like Sonia had to do anything for them at all—so where the fuck does this guy get off being judgmental about welfare recipients eating lobsters? Sometimes one luxury is the only good thing you have going for you in your life.

And it’s not like anyone outside of lobstermen—a very dangerous job, Eddie’s pretty sure, prone to injuries—do anything to earn lobsters in particular. And lobsters used to be food for poor people, because the rich didn’t want to eat them, which makes sense to Eddie because they look gross, they’re fucking gross, with their hard black shells and scuttling claws like bugs from the ocean, but god forbid the poor ever have anything the rich didn’t, whether it was crustaceans or that white bread with margarine and sprinkles, _fuck_ , Eddie hates them as much as he wants the nice things he has.

“Hey, fuck you!” Eddie shouts after him. “Hey, fuck you, I can get my own damn lobsters! I’m forty fucking years old and I can get my own damn lobsters if I want ’em, which I don’t, because _I hate lobsters!_ ”

And he’s so angry that he wakes up with his heart racing, sitting up on the couch out of a dead sleep like Dracula, wrenching his abdominal muscles in a way he never would have if he’d been conscious to make the decision.

“Whoa,” Richie says.

He’s back in the leather armchair again, though he’s kicked the towel to the floor. He peers at Eddie like they’re at the scene in the horror movie where the zombie starts rattling back to life. Eddie wonders if Richie has seen him do that before—was he there when he crashed and the hospital resuscitated him? Probably not. He wonders if he had the physical strength to fight the staff trying to save his life.

Surely, he thinks, this is a good sign. There’s no sparkling from his optic nerve in front of his eyes, no clouds of impending fog. He has the strength to sit up. Latent fury still bubbles in his chest, turning pain into something that he can control. He directs his glare at Richie.

“I hate lobsters,” he says. “I hate them. That lobster quote from fucking _Friends_? It’s not even romantic. Ross is allergic to lobster, and their relationship is _exhausting_ , and lobster _isn’t even good_ , it’s stringy and it’s sweet and it’s weird, and who the fuck has time to _clarify butter_ , and we should just leave all the fucking lobsters alone at the bottom of the sea where they belong.”

In the wake of this declaration, he feels his shoulders heaving with his exhalations. Admitting that he overreacted to a dream—well, a memory, but one muddled by his sleeping mind—would give back some of the ground he’s already taken, and he doesn’t want to do that. He took a hard stance and now he’s going to stick to it.

Richie gives him the baffled look appropriate for this interaction, but slowly his face starts to change. The smile that comes over it is nothing short of _beatific_. It makes Eddie think of decadent portraits of saints with gold foil. His chest tightens with affection, just a squeeze and then a release.

No wonder Eddie never fell in love until he remembered who he used to be. He would have thought it was an illness.

“Yeah?” Richie prompts him. It’s a gentle nudge, to see if there’s anything more lurking in Eddie’s bag of vitriol, to see if Eddie will go _And another thing!_ and continue raging.

But the target of his anger is nearly thirty years gone, and while Richie thinks Eddie’s anger is funny, Eddie is trying to be nicer to him. It’s one thing to love him and another to act like it, properly.

“Fucking yeah,” he says, and puts his hand on the back of the couch so he can guide himself back down to recline. He’s winded. If he rolls his shoulders back and tucks his scapulae closer to his spine he can lie on his back without lying directly on his incision, at the cost of squeezing his stitches a little. It’s not exactly comfortable, but he’s afraid that sleeping so much in the same position will result in bedsores on his left side.

He focuses on the lift of his chest as he catches his breath, tilting his head back so he can stare up at the ceiling. It’s not a popcorn ceiling; it has a pattern of elegant little whorls, like whoever finished it took some flat tool and went _Karate Kid_ up there. Did Ben design his ceiling? He designed everything else, why would he have stopped at the design of the ceiling?

“How do you feel about ham?” Richie asks.

Eddie tries to decide if he’s hungry, but he knows that it’s a good idea to feed himself now, even if his brain hasn’t caught up with his stomach yet. It’s easier with bacon—strong cooking smells get Eddie hungry by the time the food’s ready, and Richie’s unexpectedly particular about the way that food _looks_ on Ben’s fancy little plates.

“Ham is also sweet and weird,” he replies. “But I will eat your thin ham slices, as long as there’s no psychic bullshit.”

“It has been twenty-seven days since our last psychic bullshit,” Richie reports. He gets up with a grunt of effort, like there’s just so much of him that hauling it around takes some doing.

Eddie’s grasp on time is a little loose since the coma. “Has it been?” he asks, perplexed, remembering Stan white-faced and exhausted in the Jade of the Orient parking lot.

“What? No, I just picked a number,” Richie replies. “I’m the wrong guy to ask about the psychic bullshit.”

“Good,” Eddie says. “Then you’re the guy I want making my ham.”

Apparently Richie fried the ham slices and then realized that Eddie was not awake enough to get ready for a meal; he walks back to the kitchen and Eddie follows him, stepping around the laundry basket and perching on a barstool to watch him fry eggs and make toast while Richie hums “Any Way You Want It” under his breath. Eddie, who has never been good at half-assing things, almost wants to tell Richie to give in and sing the song or play it on his phone, because now it’s going to be stuck in his head all day, but he’s also kind of enjoying the background music that goes on in Richie’s head.

What Eddie really wants is to watch Richie unobserved—and he realizes that this is a little creepy. But Richie performs so constantly that it’s hard to catch him—and watching him dead-eyed last night guzzling Skittles and staring confusedly at a kettle was fascinating. Eddie knows that Richie’s aware of his watchful eye, which is probably why he’s only humming instead of full-on singing the way he did when Eddie fell asleep in the car. But he likes those moments of catching Richie talking to himself, or moving his hands and making faces like he’s talking.

Looking back on how much of their two weeks together Eddie has spent napping, in the shower, or hiding from Richie while he does his coughing exercises, Eddie feels comparatively uninteresting. But Richie’s still sticking around. Richie can make entertainment out of nothing, seems constantly in a whirl of activity. So is it a good thing that Richie can amuse himself while Eddie is recovering?

He’s a little afraid that Richie will get bored with him, actually. He’s led a fairly boring life so far. It’s good that Richie’s here as he tries to step out of it, but there’s not much that he can do right now.

Richie takes the lid off of the frying pan and holds it out to Eddie. “Will that work?”

He’s showing him the egg so that Eddie can decide if it’s cooked enough. Eddie watched him pour a little water into the pan and cover it, but now he sees that it steamed the egg yolk, so the surface of the egg is no longer wet and unpleasant. Instead it looks pale and fluffy. He looks back up at him, almost alarmed by how impressed and relieved he feels.

“That’ll work,” he says.

Richie sets the fried egg on top of two fried ham slices and a piece of toast and passes it to Eddie. The stack steams. Richie cracks another egg into the frying pan, mutters, “Shit,” and starts prodding at it with the spatula. Eddie is glad that he got the egg without the shell in it.

He considers the open-faced sandwich on his plate, wondering how best to eat it and if Richie will make fun of him if he asks for fork and knife. Then he gives in, picks up the piece of toast, and takes a bite. Yolk bursts over his chin. His teeth sink through the ham slices, which are indeed only medium-thin, and he has to pull a little to get a clean bite so he can put down the rest of the sandwich.

“C’n I’ve p-per tow?” he mumbles through his mouthful of food.

Richie turns to look at him and grins hugely, but obligingly leans back across the kitchen and pulls two paper towels from the roll beside the sink. He comes over and holds them out to Eddie. Eddie reaches for them and Richie moves his hand back a little, withholding. “Smile for me,” he says.

Eddie flips him off.

Richie gives him the paper towels and returns to the stove. Eddie eats, mopping at his face when necessary. The toast is buttery, and the ham slices are smoky and almost caramelized from being cooked. The egg white feels cooked enough, and the yolk is gooey and soft. Somehow it feels almost as indulgent as the biscuits and gravy from the diner in Connecticut.

“Maggie does something like this,” Richie says. He’s standing with his head tilted at an angle and squinting at the contents of the frying pan, like he can side-eye the egg into being ready in a timely manner. “I’m just copying her ideas. Hers is, like, fancy, though. English muffins and pepper jelly.”

Eddie deliberately chews on the side of his mouth without the broken tooth, which he really has to take care of. He swallows, pleased by the difference in texture between the crumbs of toast and the velvety yolk.

“What’s pepper jelly?” he asks.

Richie shrugs. “You can make jelly out of basically any fruit. Apparently hot peppers are one of those fruit.”

Eddie tilts his head, trying to understand. “Is it, like, spicy?”

“Yeah. You know those cinnamon jelly beans?”

Eddie was never allowed to have them when he was a kid, but Richie was, sauntering around with his Jelly Belly mini packets of forty-nine flavors. On more than one occasion Richie held a red jelly bean out to him, insisting it was red apple, only to hoot in delight when it was cinnamon and Eddie spat it out and raged at him.

“Yes,” Eddie says darkly, glaring at him.

Richie’s grin says that he remembers that too. “Basically like that.”

Eddie tries to imagine the appeal of putting cinnamon jelly beans on his toast. Moments ago he hadn’t thought it could be improved upon—he even watched Richie put salt and pepper on the egg, and hold the butter over the burner until it softened enough that he could spread it on the toast.

“Can we buy pepper jelly?” he asks. He figures that it can’t hurt to try it.

Richie slides his egg onto his own toast, turns off the burner, and moves the pan to the rear of the stove to cool. “Sure we can,” he says. “We’re adults. Who’s gonna stop us? What other food adventures do you wanna go on?”

“Ben fed me anchovies,” Eddie reminds him. “Does that count?”

“In Caesar dressing, no. You don’t get, like, the skin and the eyes and the bones.” Richie picks up his toast and appears to unhinge his lower jaw and stuff half of the piece of toast into his mouth, still standing in Ben’s kitchen. It should be incredibly disturbing. Somehow it is not.

Eddie shudders, both at his own lack of revulsion for Richie’s table manners and at the idea of eating a whole fish. “I don’t want to eat a whole anchovy.”

“I might be thinking of sardines,” Richie offers almost conciliatorily. He has to have burned his mouth, right? Does he just not have any nerve endings in his mouth after years of drinking scalding coffee?

He swallows without chewing nearly enough and then inspects the web between his index finger and thumb, shrugs, and sucks it into his mouth to clean it. Eddie watches the way his fingers fit against his jaw and how the skin of his hand comes away shiny and wet.

Oblivious to Eddie’s thousand-yard stare, Richie adds, “Anchovies are littler, they’re not as bad,” before cramming the rest of the toast in his mouth.

One of the things that Sonia and then Myra were very concerned about was that the things Eddie did reflected on them. It made sense to Eddie, to a degree: the actions of a child reflected on the parents, because they were responsible for raising them; and then the actions of a spouse reflected on the person who married them, because being with them was a choice.

In a way, Eddie’s judging himself for being this attracted to Richie as he messily scarfs down egg, ham, and toast.

“You won’t eat the oil on top of cream cheese,” Eddie reminds him. He’s still staring at Richie’s mouth, watching him lick crumbs off of his lower lip.

“’Cause it’s fucking gross,” Richie says. He swallows again. “I went on _Late Late_ and I ate some weird shit there, but oily cream cheese is—” He gives a much larger, more theatrical shudder than Eddie’s. Performing.

Eddie is having difficulty thinking of anything that isn’t Richie’s mouth right now, so his imagination is a little limited when it comes to the weird things he might have eaten on TV. He suspects that this is a mercy. “Please don’t ever tell me what you ate on _Late Late_.”

“If I ever want you to kiss me again?” Richie asks, like Eddie didn’t just watch him swallow a sandwich like a boa constrictor eating a small animal. But Richie saying it out loud like that makes Eddie flush hot anyway. He grins, teasing. “Sure. There’s a video of me on _Hot Ones_ , though, if you ever really wanna watch me suffer.”

Eddie has never heard of _Hot Ones_ but suddenly the idea of Richie being on it fills him with irrational possessive anger. It must be connected to food somehow, but the idea of Richie being on a show called _Hot Ones_ —people looking at him and going, _Oh, yeah, that’s Richie Tozier, he was on_ Hot Ones—makes him jealous. _Eddie_ knows that Richie is hot, but the idea of someone else knowing that and putting him on a show for it is… He scowls.

This, Richie notices. “What?”

“Nothing,” Eddie lies. “Show me the video.”

* * *

Ben’s ridiculous smart TV is so convoluted that every time they want to open up another streaming service, Richie has to look up how to do it on his phone and then follow the steps on one of three separate remote controls. Eddie sits on the couch with his phone in his hand, offering to call Ben to ask for help every time Richie curses.

The last message that Ben sent him was _I’m sorry! Do you not like anchovies?_ And because Eddie really enjoyed the sandwich while he was eating it, he’s somewhat reluctant to pick up the thread of the conversation and admit that he liked it until he knew what it was. So Eddie hopes that Richie can figure this out on his own.

“Ah-ha!” Richie says when he finally gets YouTube up on the screen. Ben’s suggested videos include a bunch of yoga and other workout routines, some people building LEGOs, and a clip of a Property Brother being run over by a Barbie Jeep. Eddie watches Richie use the control pad to type in _tozier hot ones_ and tries not to feel too warm and fuzzy about his squinty expression of concentration.

In the thumbnail for the video, Richie looks very like he does now, with somewhat more orderly hair. He’s wearing a gray short-sleeved button down with a pattern of little red fish, and his mouth is full as he makes eye contact with the person sitting across from him. The title reads “Richie Tozier Talks Trash While Eating Spicy Wings.”

Oh. It looks like Eddie badly misunderstood the premise of this show.

To cover up his internal faux pas, he scoots to the middle of the couch and pats the corner cushion, indicating to Richie where he should sit down.

“Okay, I know I suggested this, but I hate watching myself on screen, and I blocked out most of this day because it hurt a lot,” Richie says. He puts the remote down with its brethren on the table and throws himself down on the couch, so big that he jostles Eddie a little bit. Eddie immediately brings his feet up and leans sideways into Richie.

“You just eat spicy wings?” he asks.

“I eat the spiciest wings out there,” Richie says. “You’ll see.”

When the ad ends, there’s a short clip of Richie with a red filter over the video and a dramatic drum noise that makes Eddie think of Dick Wolf. He takes a big gulp of milk, which sloshes down his chin, and then takes a deep breath and lets out a loud high-pitched whoop like a mariachi singer.

Then it cuts to a yellow logo and some dramatic music. Eddie shifts even closer to Richie and leans his head on his bicep, trying to get Richie to recline on the couch too.

“Okay, cozy-cat,” Richie says, sounding long-suffering as he brings his feet up and boxes Eddie in.

Eddie puts his weight on Richie’s side and makes himself comfortable, using Richie’s body as a sort of bolster to keep him tilted at an angle that doesn’t hurt any of his incisions. He rests his left fist on Richie’s sternum and lets his forearm fold down across his chest towards his navel. It’s extremely comfortable. Richie actually has no right to be this warm and comfortable, actually. He doesn’t look up to check Richie’s expression as the show’s host, who looks like Justin Timberlake with a shaved head, introduces himself, the show, and Richie.

“You won an Emmy?” Eddie asks, surprised.

“The writer’s room won an Emmy,” Richie says. “It’s not a big deal. If I’d won an Emmy, I would be carrying it around with me all the time. I’d have, like, pistol-whipped the clown with it.”

“Didn’t you fly into Bangor?” Eddie asks. “Can you fly with an Emmy?”

“It would have been my one personal item,” Richie says.

The host asks Richie if he feels prepared to eat chicken wings, and Richie—who has a weird smile on his face that Eddie recognizes as genuine nervousness—makes a joke about his lifetime eating junk food.

“They do a lot of research for this show, actually,” Richie says slowly, frowning at his own image onscreen. “Wonder how the fuck they did that when everything involving me from birth to age eighteen got clown-whammied.”

“Your parents remembered a little,” Eddie points out.

There’s a truly disgusting close-up of some teeth—not Richie’s—nibbling on a chicken wing with a flame effect in the foreground and the same dramatic music playing. Then the flames are overlaid with Richie waggling his eyebrows directly into the camera.

“I don’t think they reached out to my parents,” Richie says. “I haven’t really—that whole part of my life, I tried to…” He falls silent.

Richie said that he hadn’t been home in twenty years, and that was his first trip to his parents’ house. They really had very opposite experiences as adults—for one, Eddie only left home eight years ago, and he went directly from living in environmental and financial comfort in his mother’s house to living in environmental and financial comfort with his wife. And Richie—Richie went to Hollywood and at some point developed a cocaine habit and went to rehab. Eddie can barely imagine the kind of lifestyle that Richie has, and how he got there.

“Hang on, I’ve seen this before. If I start choking on a chicken bone, will someone do the Heimlich on me?” the Richie onscreen asks.

“Uh, I’m not gonna say for legal reasons that you should do anything—” the host starts.

On screen, Richie shoves the entire chicken wing in his mouth, holding onto the end of it with his fingertips. His jaw and lips work for a minute, and then he pulls out two clean bones.

Eddie stares. “What.”

In his peripheral vision Richie’s chin appears as he ducks his head, trying to look at his expression. “What?”

“Is that how you eat chicken wings?” Eddie asks. He feels like, instead of showing him a video, Richie slapped him in the face.

“Well, like, the wings that are baby spicy, yeah,” Richie says. “It tasted like Frank’s, if I did that with the tenth wing I’d like burn a hole in my whole face.”

Eddie, who actually had a hole in his face, scowls at the screen as Richie sets his chicken bones down.

“It’s not bad,” says the Richie on the video.

“When did you do this?” Eddie asks.

“Last year,” Richie says. “It came out in like February. It was supposed to be press for the tour I’m supposed to be on now, actually.”

Eddie scrunches one eye shut and wonders if they should be watching this video. But Richie suggested it and pulled it up, and it might be worse now to turn the video off and sit in awkward silence. He rubs his fist in a circle across Richie’s chest, knuckles traversing over the hardness of his breastbone to the softer give of his pectoral muscles.

“What are you doing?” Richie asks.

The answer is _petting you or something_ , but Eddie doesn’t want to say that out loud. “I don’t know,” he says.

“Cozy cat,” Richie croons, and pushes his nose into Eddie’s hair.

Eddie gives up his kneading and reaches out to pat Richie’s right bicep. Richie has nice arms. Eddie noticed that as soon as Richie took off his jacket in the Jade of the Orient back in Derry. It’s probably why it only took two beers for Eddie to challenge Richie to an arm-wrestling contest, something he thought was an appropriate bonding activity with a long-lost childhood friend but that he would never do with anyone else in his life. Three beers in, Eddie started quoting _South Park_ , a show he only occasionally saw on hotel TVs when he was travelling for work but seemed like it might be Richie’s sort of humor. Four beers in, Eddie couldn’t think about anything except the tendon in Richie’s forearm. And on the fifth beer, the fortune cookies happened.

The expression Richie onscreen is wearing right now is sort of familiar in that way—he’s very afraid of these spicy wings, but not because they’re possessed by a demon. The video is sort of vaguely interesting in that Eddie likes Richie and enjoys watching him talk, and even enjoys watching him complain about how the chicken wings are cold and joke about how he’s hungover. The host is asking him about his favorite comedians, and Richie interrupts himself in the middle of a story about playing slots with Nick Kroll to apologize for accidentally spitting on the host. Richie is charismatic as usual, even as he picks up his glass and asks the host, “Did they milk you for this?” and the host nods and agrees that it was fresh-squeezed this morning.

The editing is good, too. The music gets more intense as the wings get spicier, and either they’re increasing the red filter on the screen or Richie is flushing because of the hot sauce. Sometimes Richie talks about comedic theory, which is interesting just because Richie is clearly invested in it. Sometimes he talks about women, girlfriends, and Eddie wants to ask if they were real, like the girlfriend Richie was invested enough in to get a vasectomy for. But he keeps his mouth shut.

He distracts himself by poring over Richie’s heavy arm, tracing the blue veins down the back of his hand. His radius forms a straight line and on either side muscle brackets it, softly curving and widening towards his elbow. His elbows aren’t sharp and bony like they used to be, either, back when he and Eddie were getting picked last in gym class. He runs his hands up towards his tricep and watches Richie shiver a little when Eddie puts his cold fingertips on his warm skin.

Richie’s basically in theater, how the fuck do his arms look like this?

Onscreen, Richie begins sweating and dabbing at his forehead, taking his glasses off.

“Don’t touch your eyes!” Eddie says immediately, like Richie from the past can hear him.

At the same time the host on the video says, “Careful around the eyes!” and Eddie feels more approving of him and a little sorry that Richie accidentally spat on him.

Richie laughs, the jerks of his chest bouncing Eddie slightly. “I don’t,” he says. “It gets worse, though.”

Eddie takes hold of Richie’s wrist and makes him extend his arm. Richie lets him, unresisting. Eddie plays with the different ways that his elbow can bend, rotates his radius back and forth, sees how he can make that defined line along his bicep appear and then soften. then he pulls his hand close, spreads his fingers, touches each of his knuckles. Follows the sharp angle from the base of his thumb to the heel of his palm.

The heavy cast of his bones reminds Eddie of fallen trees, the kind they used to walk over like bridges in the woods leading into the Barrens. When the summers were particularly wet—unlike in Eddie’s dream—the moss grew thick on them. Stan consulted his Boy Scout Handbook and told them that moss grew on the north side of trees; Richie asked, _You need your eyes checked? There’s moss all over that thing, it’s got a full bush_ ; and Eddie tilted his head and pointed, saying, _That’s north, right?_ and made Stan check it with his compass.

Eddie puts Richie’s arm back, but continues petting at the hair there. “You’re like a tree,” he says.

“I’m like a tree?”

Eddie becomes aware that it might be sort of rude to have Richie’s interview on and not be properly watching it, but he’s also on painkillers and he’s pretty sure he can blame his bad behavior on that. Richie doesn’t seem to mind either the inattention or the manhandling.

Eddie knows that he’s being very weird right now. It’s not like examining all of Richie’s component parts will help Eddie understand the whole any better, but it’s still interesting. Absorbing.

“Like a tree. You know,” Eddie says. Richie was there and he should know.

“I was afraid that you were going to say I’m like a chicken wing.”

There’s a certain appeal to the wings on the show. Even Eddie, who has never eaten fried chicken—both because of the inherent unhealthiness of fried things and the messiness—finds something clean and appealing about the white strips of meat that Richie and the host pull away with their teeth. Richie has stopped _deepthroating chicken wings_ , mother of God. There’s also something satisfying about watching them set the bones down. Eddie imagines that it might feel like checking something off of a list, that satisfaction of knowing the task is complete.

He looks down at the soft solid muscle of Richie’s forearm. For a moment, he considers biting him, just gently. Just testing that resistance with his teeth. A nibble.

“Maybe a little,” he replies. He traces a line from the back of Richie’s hand all the way down the back of his forearm, toward the jut of his elbow. “That’s your radial nerve.”

“Yeah?” Richie asks. Eddie doubts that he cares about anatomy—aside from all of the anatomically-correct jokes he’s made over the years—but he still raises his eyebrows to prompt him to go on.

“Mmm-hmm.” He puts pressure on Richie’s hand, gently bending it back at the wrist. Then he pulls his fingers apart, makes him flex his first two fingers, and taps at the upper knuckle of his thumb. “Make a fist,” he says.

Richie obliges. “You gonna ask me to pull your finger, too?”

Eddie rubs the pad of his thumb across Richie’s first two knuckles. Richie got into enough fistfights when they were in high school—back when he finally got tall enough to hold his own for a little bit instead of being wiped out instantly. But Eddie can’t remember him winning a single one.

Stan is the one who taught Eddie to make a fist. Eddie was still folding his thumb into his palm when they met in the fourth grade, and Stan looked at him and sighed—not like he was disappointed in Eddie, but like he saw something he had to fix and now he couldn’t get out of it. He took Eddie’s hand and explained to him in a hard voice much older than he usually sounded where to put his thumb and how to hit with his first two knuckles, and how to keep his wrist straight so he didn’t hurt himself trying to help himself. Eddie, who never had a father to show him such things and whose mother would have a fit of the vapors at the suggestion of Eddie _fighting_ , accepted his guidance without question, and then almost never used it.

He’s like Stan, in that way. He forgot how to fight until it really mattered.

Eddie takes hold of Richie’s index and middle fingers and makes a fist around them, squeezing gently. “This is where my arm is fucked up,” he says. He knows that his grip is much weaker than even his left hand, which, since he’s right-handed, doesn’t give him much confidence in the ground he’s regained since leaving the hospital.

Richie lets out a gentle breath through his nose too quiet to be a sigh. “Do you know why?”

“Not the break,” he says immediately, wanting to absolve Richie of any possible responsibility. “It was never like this. I didn’t even know anything was wrong. I didn’t know I’d ever broken a bone.”

Hypochondria, nebulous feeling that it is, very rarely manifested in places in Eddie that could be checked and cleared immediately. His breathing bothered him—something terrifying and dangerous and self-fulfilling, because when he was stressed about his breathing he breathed faster and he felt his throat closing and only the act of dragging on the inhaler could make him feel better. It went after his guts and his sex drive and the other soft parts of him. Eddie sometimes worried about his knees or his back, because he’s forty and he sometimes likes to run, but he never thought to worry about his right forearm. He never had a single complaint.

Sometimes the issue of broken bones came up in conversation. Icebreakers in forced workplace bonding activities. Eddie was always a little proud when he remembered. He didn’t know that he’d ever been the kind of person to live recklessly enough to break one.

He releases his grip on Richie’s fingers and looks idly at the screen, tucking his head down into Richie’s chest. He’s given up on pretending that he’s not cuddling. Richie is _plush_ , almost, especially compared to the couch.

Onscreen, Richie has drained his glass of milk and is gesturing at the host’s glass, going, “Do you mind if I—?” and not waiting for an answer.

“Probably the whole… heart stopped thing,” Eddie says.

He’s aware that nerve damage can be a side-effect of interrupted circulation. It would make sense that it started in his extremities, in the places where his blood was furthest away from his exhausted heart. Middle finger, index finger, thumb. Radius in his forearm, already taxed from the amateur setting years ago. The way that certain illnesses manifest given predisposition and stress, but not one or the other.

“Oh, that,” Richie quips. He’s clearly trying for breezy, but it comes out a little hollow.

Earlier it was so easy to take comfort from Richie’s body, even though they were just shouting at each other. Eddie pushes his face harder into Richie’s chest, feeling his pectoral _squish_ slightly under Eddie’s cheek.

“Okay,” Richie says. Eddie isn’t completely sure where his face is in relation to Richie’s nipple, but based on the immediate tension in Richie’s voice, he’d guess _right on top of it_. “Okay. Okay. Is this what a memory foam mattress feels like? Like, _being_ a mattress?”

“Maybe,” Eddie says, and turns his whole face into Richie’s chest and rubs there like a cat, just because he can. Richie’s thighs go tense and he laughs.

“I feel like Sculpy,” he complains.

“You look like Gumby.”

Richie barks a laugh, sounding delighted.

Eddie doesn’t actually want to hurt Richie’s feelings, and he’s trying to be better about sincerity. He turns his head to the side again and pats Richie’s other pec. “I didn’t mean that,” he says, a little abashed considering he just effectively motorboated another forty-year-old man. “You don’t look like Gumby. You look nice.”

“I look _nice_?” Richie repeats, as though this is a foreign concept to him.

Somehow this is more embarrassing than rubbing his face all over Richie’s chest. “You’re… nice looking,” Eddie hedges, tucking his chin so that Richie can only see the top of his head.

Richie leans forward trying to make eye contact. Eddie makes a growling noise and tucks even further away.

“You look nice!” Eddie snaps. “You don’t look like Gumby! You look—you’re good-looking, fuck off!”

Richie begins giggling, the jerking of his chest bouncing Eddie as Eddie tries to hide deeper in Richie’s t-shirt and body fat. “That’s my preferred way of receiving compliments—say something nice and then curse me out.”

On the screen, the other Richie makes a pained noise. Eddie looks up—it’s weird to have him in stereo on both sides of the room—and sees that Richie is excusing himself to the bathroom. The host gives him directions in relation to the green room, and the on-screen Richie rushes off camera. A gray screen asks the viewers to stand by.

“You said the show was called _Hot Ones_ and I did not know at all what it was going to be about,” Eddie admits. “Do they show the—” He’s about to ask if the standby lasts for the duration of Richie’s bathroom break in real time, and then the video cuts back in to Richie reappearing onscreen.

“So,” the onscreen Richie says.

“You thought I was hot enough to be on a show called _Hot Ones_?” Richie guesses accurately, utter glee in his voice.

“No!” Eddie lies.

“You okay, man?” the host asks. “You look a little…” He gestures at his own face.

“Baby, you wanna watch porn, all you have to do is ask,” real-life Richie murmurs.

That… Voice should not work so easily on Eddie. Eddie should resist that. And _baby_ makes his eyes scrunch shut and his shoulders creep up toward his ears, unsure whether he likes it or not but certain that Richie has his undivided attention. He also doesn’t want to yell _Don’t call me baby!_ or _I don’t want to watch porn!_ because he’s not sure that either of those things are how he really feels about those issues.

“No!” he repeats, facedown in Richie’s chest again.

Richie keeps laughing at him.

“You should probably have a sign up in your bathroom,” says the on-screen Richie, who appears to be in some distress. “Like on the mirror. Or on the door. Or, like, one of those light-up traffic signs on the side of the road that say _BATHE IN MILK BEFORE YOU TOUCH YOUR DICK TO PEE_ , you know.”

“Oh. Yeah, that happens,” says the host.

Eddie looks back up, quizzical. It takes him a few moments to connect the dots—that the host warned Richie to be careful around his eyes, but didn’t warn him to be careful around his dick.

“Richie,” Eddie says in some distress.

“Anyway, my dick grew three sizes that day and it has not backed down since. I can show you,” Richie reports matter-of-factly, reaching threateningly for the waistband of his pajama pants.

Eddie grabs for his wrists. “Don’t you dare!”

Richie lets him hold him, still laughing helplessly. “I’m not gonna say it was worth it, but this is making up for it.”

* * *

Compared to the drama of Richie undressing him earlier, standing half-naked in the bathroom before his shower is somehow disappointing. He’s always felt better after taking a shower—something about being clean, something about the mammalian dive reflex, something about hot water drumming down on him and steam clearing his sinuses—but interrupting whatever he’s doing to go take a shower just reminds him of all of the things that he has to do in a day.

Now he has basically nothing to do in a day. And he’s been putting off taking a real shower all morning.

Eddie turns on the shower. He leaves the water cooler than he would otherwise, turning the dial only halfway instead of directly into the red. He doesn’t want to either overheat and pass out or scald his wounds. It’s just good practice—he always starts out with cooler water to wash his face and hair, and then warms the temperature up to what feels good. Except now he doesn’t get to warm up the water.

But it’s better than nothing, he reminds himself. And the goal of this shower is not to relax, it’s to clean up and save his life.

Somewhere over a gap of some thirty years, Eddie Kaspbrak rolls his eyes at himself.

He slides the curtain shut and turns to contemplate the closed door. He walks over to it and listens. He can’t hear Richie over the sound of the thrumming water.

He turns the lock on the knob, and then tries it. It refuses to turn. Then he unlocks it again.

He opens the door and peers through the crack. He left Richie in the living room, but he wants to be cautious, and it turns out that Richie can be quiet when he wants to be now. He makes sure that the coast is clear—the long hallway leading toward darkened bedrooms on one end and the massive windows on the other—and then calls out, “Hey, Richie!”

“Yeah?” Richie calls back. He’s definitely just behind the wall, but for once in his life he seems to be choosing just one between being seen and being heard.

“I’m leaving the door unlocked.”

“Huh?” Richie asks.

Eddie waits for Richie to process what he said, and when there’s no verbal confirmation, he repeats, “I’m leaving the door unlocked. But if you come in and I’m not dying, I will kill you.”

There’s a pause, and then Richie’s laughter cracks off of all of the modern reflective surfaces in the living room. “Understood,” he says, not taking the death threat seriously at all.

Eddie closes the door and eyeballs the doorknob again. As portals go, it seems flimsy. But it’s not like locked doors have offered much protection lately. What did a locked door do to save him from Henry Bowers? And It tried to separate them with a locked door in the kitchen of 29 Neibolt Street, so it could throw a teenaged werewolf at them and try to cut Ben open in the other room.

Locks provide a sensation of safety. But if someone really wanted to get through one, they could. Eddie knows that if he collapsed, that if Richie shouted for him and Eddie didn’t respond, Richie could slam through this door. He touches the doorframe, contemplating what part of the door would break first. It should be the hinges, but he doesn’t know if Richie has enough sense to consider it, or if he’d try to use his mass to his advantage.

This is not the right mood to approach his shower with. He reminds himself that Richie is practically guarding the door, and that Richie has a pretty good track record with defending others. There’s no one in the room but Eddie. Nothing hides behind or _in_ the mirror—he opens the medicine cabinet and makes sure—and there’s nothing scary at all in the linen closet. No monsters watch him from the drain.

Maybe he should put on some music to take his mind off of his raging paranoia? He’s pretty sure that “Rock Me, Amadeus” would be completely the wrong song to commit murder to—just incredibly undramatic, the murderer would feel like an idiot.

On the other hand, if Richie heard him taking a shower with “Rock Me, Amadeus” in the background, Eddie would then have to put up with Richie’s commentary, possibly for the rest of linear time. Dying in the shower might be less irritating in the long run.

He looks back at his reflection—skinny, pale, freckles vanishing on his forearms, eyes like black holes in his thin face. Big ugly black and purple bruises marking where he died and got back up again afterwards. Two bright splotches on his throat like a pair of binary stars. Stitches running across his body like train tracks.

He sighs, peels off his shorts and boxers, folds them, and sets them on a pile on the closed toilet seat. He steps into the shower without any problem, and the risk analyst part of his brain reminds him that he’d probably be more secure with a safety rail, and the thirteen-year-old little shit who lives in his brain immediately shouts the businessman down. Eddie would recommend it for anyone _but_ him, which is the infuriating part. Ben suggested that he move to the master bedroom so that he could use the master bath, which has a bench in the shower.

And it would be the smart thing to do. But Eddie doesn’t want to be smart. He wants to not have to worry about that stuff.

The water is warm, technically, but the kind of warmth that makes him colder around the edges, makes him want to draw closer to the center of the spray and protect himself from the open air and exposure and the extraction fan. He stands there for several seconds, waiting for the heat to soak into him, trying to untense his shoulders.

He uses a gentle eczema facewash. He doesn’t have eczema, but he chalks that up to the success of the eczema facewash. The incisions get the orange Dial soap, a little more direct interference than the alcohol wipes they used for the spot-cleaning earlier. Putting his fingers on the threads, even to clean them, makes him shiver with the wrongness. They can’t possibly be a part of him, so why are they there?

He has to turn his face away from the spray and gulp for air. He was never sick as a child. He broke his arm. It was an injury. A whole lifetime spent in bubblewrap, and not only was he never even sick, but physical pain was almost a letdown after all of the hype. Was it because of his mother’s precautions that he managed to avoid illness? Or were they all gazebos to begin with?

He remembers the shoe store they went to when he was a kid. The light-up scanner to see if his shoes fit correctly, and how his mother almost knocked him off his feet trying to get him away from it. Now he can’t remember if she was afraid of him falling over and hurting himself—she would have had him in a bubble if she could—or if it was the radio imaging that bothered her, the idea that Eddie might develop cancer of the feet or something.

She spent all the time warning him about illness and dirt germs, but it was injury that got him in the end. His immune system is apparently robust, but his body remains woefully puncturable.

He wishes that there was a sort of inoculation for physical trauma. That the broken arm when he was a kid could in some way prepare his body to heal itself from this bigger, more terrifying injury. He wishes that he’d spent more time roughhousing, more time running—all things that wouldn’t have made a difference when it came to being stabbed in the back, but he wishes he had those things. He’d like to be able to do them in the future.

It might actually be convenient for Richie to join him in the shower, he muses as he probes carefully in the vicinity of his back with his Dial-tipped fingers. It’s hard to reach his posterior incision, and because that one has already had an infection, it’s the one that makes him the most nervous.

But the idea of Richie seeing him like this—completely naked, dick out, incisions glaring, drowned rat—is out of the question. Teasing each other during a spot clean is one thing, but this would be so much worse. So much more vulnerable. He wants Richie to look at his body a certain way and he’s afraid that he never will, that it will never be any more significant than Myra barging into their room with an armful of clean laundry and Eddie, fresh out of the shower, skittering to grab his towel as though she even seemed to notice. He wants Richie to notice.

He wants Richie to take up half the space in the shower and block the hot water and loom over him and murmur almost directly into Eddie’s ear and make him blush all the way down his chest. And he wants to feel that shivery want the whole time, dare himself to step back into Richie’s body and make him catch him.

He lowers his head as much as he can so he can shampoo his hair. It’s a stretch, with his limited ability to lift his arms. He braces his elbows on the wall and scrubs at the crown of his head, at the nape of his neck, at the sides over his ears. He sinks his fingers in deep, he prods at the muscles in the back of his neck in the hopes of loosening them, he scrapes his nails over his scalp.

That incessant curiosity in the back of his mind keeps it up, reminding him that washing his hair would be better if Richie did it. That Richie already gave him one scalp massage, but Eddie could stand up straight for it, Eddie could tilt his head back and let Richie clean him up, Richie cold probably hold him up between two hands. Eddie has _some_ body hair, but Richie is gorgeous, thickly protected, insulated from the world—and what would it feel like to put his hands on his chest like this, in the shower? Feel the hot water as it sluices down off of him.

To clear his brain, Eddie turns and faces directly into the shower head. He closes his eyes and opens his mouth and more or less tries to gargle his wayward thoughts out of his system.

He doesn’t want to be maintained; he wants to be _touched_. He wants _to_ touch.

He looks down at his own flaccid penis, hanging limply between his thighs like a stupid little acorn. _Anything?_ he feels like asking it. It gives no response. Almost angrily, he plays back the memory of Richie shampooing his hair in the hospital bed, his knuckles rubbing circles into his scalp. Like a noogie but with more care.

Richie has nice hands. He seems to know what to do with them.

The pit of his stomach flutters pleasantly. Considering Eddie now feels like he’s trying to bully himself into a reaction—using something less ambiguous and more pleasant than a nightmare—at least that’s something. He’s not _hard_ , but he thinks he might be _interested_. And he’s safe, too—as long as he keeps it to himself and doesn’t say any of it to Richie, nobody can hold any of it against him. No one can judge him except himself.

He doesn’t know if Richie would mind. But maybe he would. Eddie doesn’t know. Maybe all of his little fantasies about sharing shower space—not even sex, but _washing his hair_ for crying out loud—would be too… _touchy feely_ for Richie, after his complaints about Eddie shoving him around into position. Surely Richie is accustomed to more interesting showermates. More athletic ones. More attractive ones, just based on the general population of Los Angeles.

He rinses his hair again, but he’s pretty sure he’s gotten all of the suds out of it. He soaps the back of his neck as best as he can, elbows folded tight to his chest to keep tension off of his stitches. He cleans his ears, his shoulders, under his arms. He uses the Dial on the incision from the chest tube, which is easier to reach but more difficult to rinse than the larger verticle ones.

If he were back in New York in his shower, he would use a loofah to exfoliate his back; he’s perpetually dry there. He has a special body wash just for his back and shoulders, moisturizing to make up for the hot water he blasts on it every day. The skin on a man’s back is thicker than anywhere else on his body—with a padding of muscle and subcutaneous fat. Eddie once read that was why men evolved to sleep with their backs towards the door, to defend their organs and any bed partners. It’s safer to take an injury there, safer to wrap protectively around someone.

Instead of the horrifying memory of his childhood monster under the bed stabbing him in the back, his brain supplies him with the sense memory of Richie sliding into bed behind him. Wrapping around him. Warm. Heavy.

He’s almost belligerent when he scrubs at his groin and thighs. It’s been a while since he’s considered his personal grooming for any reasons other than functionality. He hyperventilated about it the day before his wedding, wondering if Myra would be revolted by his pubic hair and then worrying in turn about what kind of bacteria he would expose himself to if he tried to remove it or nicked himself in the process, and eventually he opted for the safer choice of leaving it where it was, and Myra never said anything anyway. But that was as close as Eddie ever came to worrying about what another person might find _attractive_. If he wants to start an actual physical relationship—and he does—is he going to have to worry about shaping his pubic hair?

He has a mental image of that topiary scene from _Edward Scissorhands_ and makes a note to convey that idea to Richie. Though he has to make sure that when he tells the joke, it has absolutely nothing to do with his own pubes at all. The idea has to have appeared fully-formed in his head, like something out of Greek mythology.

Well, Eddie owns a hair trimmer now.

Though he uses that for his face, too, so he’ll have to get a second hair trimmer. And maybe label it, or get a color-coded strip of tape or something. If Richie sees a hair trimmer labeled _GROIN_ it’ll be just as bad as making the _Edward Scissorhands_ joke to his face about his own privates.

Privates. How old is he?

He rinses his dick clean and tries to decide if the sensation is actually physical arousal or just warm water and recently-returned erectile function. “Don’t get your hopes up,” he mutters aloud to it. It’s been a long day, and it’s not even noon. He’s already passed out once. He’s not ready to risk jerking off for the first time in months and blacking out entirely.

He scowls as he washes his ass.

For weeks now, he’s been an invalid recovering from thoracic surgery. He’s on opioid painkillers. He finally finished his prescribed course of medication for his antibiotic-resistant urinary tract infection, but he’s still on laxatives. His entire lower body aches from overexertion, and he feels faintly bloated. All in all, he feels less sexy than he’s ever felt in his entire life—which must be a quantity into the negatives, because he can’t remember a time he ever felt particularly sexy.

But Richie said he loves him. Three times, he said it. Four, if Eddie counts the time that he said it twice while making toast. If Richie is to be believed, he’s… into him.

Something squirmy and panicky inside of him—like something found underneath an overturned rock—tells him that he’s sick and fragile and wounded and tired and constipated and inexperienced and historically bad at sex, so he should absolutely keep all of his thoughts to himself and try to hide his more repulsive parts. He burns now, remembering asking Richie if he could leave a hickey on his neck—how embarrassing it was to spit the words out.

But the rest of him remembers how it felt to ask for something and immediately receive it. The immediate gratification as Richie soothed his mortification with his mouth. How Richie grabbed him and hauled him in like he couldn’t help it, he just had to.

That memory burns in a different way. Richie losing control—if that’s what he did. The pit of Eddie’s stomach tightens. His dick stirs hopefully, _exactly like he told it not to._

_Fuck_ , Eddie was mediocre at sex with a woman, one he was _married_ to and who had _no sexual experience other than him_. Richie has sex. Richie has sex with men. Richie knows what the fuck he’s doing, which is incredibly distracting to think of combined with the memory of his thick gorgeous arms and his leather, aftershave, and hotel shampoo smell and the way that the black button-down strained across his chest—

Eddie continues glaring down at his useless penis. He will turn the cold water on it if he has to. He’s practiced enough at self-abnegation that the idea doesn’t scare him.

But god, he’s absolutely going to fuck up any actual—well—fucking. He has no idea what he’s about. He can’t move his torso. He fully expects to make a fool out of himself, and the likelihood of that is… high. That’s not just his paranoia talking, those are objective odds.

He soaps his hands and experimentally prods at his anus with a finger. This is not a new practice; hygiene is very important; the fecal-oral route is one of the most common methods of illness transmission. On any given day, Eddie does his best to make sure that he has a clean butthole.

But most of the time, having an asshole just seems like a liability. It’s a necessity, sure, to evacuate waste, but it’s at constant risk of hemorrhoids or contamination or constipation or diarrhea or fistulas or—

Actually, it seems like a nice compact metaphor for his whole body: he has to have it, he barely knows how to run damage-control for all of its dangers, and frequently it seems like more trouble than it’s worth.

And some people use theirs for sex.

Honestly, Eddie doesn’t see much appeal in his own body. Or his own ass.

He considers what he thinks about Richie’s ass. Much like Richie’s body refuses to be gross, even the abstract concept of Richie’s asshole is… fine. There’s a conspicuous lack of instinctive revulsion in the space where Eddie should be sputtering and shaking his head. Richie’s ass itself, however, will require further research. Richie is… big, and handsome, and thick-set, and honestly Eddie should probably grope his ass to figure out how he feels about it. His general feelings towards Richie tend to be extremely positive, but he isn’t sure about any feelings localized to the ass.

This is the politely inquisitive mindset with which Eddie cautiously inserts a fingertip inside himself.

It feels like nothing in particular. Slightly uncomfortable, considering that he’s not used to constant awareness of his own anus. The inner muscles are surprisingly strong. He can’t say that he ever really thought much about his own rectum, but it turns out that _anal retentive_ is apparently a literal description. So is _tightass_.

It’s soft. It doesn’t feel like pushing his finger into one of those woven finger traps from when he was a kid, that tightened the harder he tried to pull—not that he was expecting that exactly, but he’s having a hard time coming up with other things that he regularly sticks his fingers into. _Glove_ isn’t accurate either—Eddie had a pair of nice leather gloves once upon a time, but they were thin material, and the solidity of his own body means that they don’t really compare. If he thinks of his body as having _walls_ —and really that seems like too strong a word for a very soft, yielding surface—there’s a gentle rise as it gets tighter the further up. More like pushing his fingertip into a soft, faintly wet crease. It doesn’t hurt, that’s the main thing; Eddie was afraid that it was going to hurt. Instead the tightness feels… sort of sharp in its intensity. A non-painful sting that reminds him faintly, absurdly, of lemon juice.

It doesn’t feel even a little bit sexy.

He removes his hands and soaps them three more times before he continues washing himself from thighs to toes. He still doesn’t understand the appeal. He’s aware of the existence of the prostate gland and its purposes, but it’s much deeper inside him than he dares to venture. Behind his arms far enough to wipe his ass is difficult enough; he’s not ready to go spelunking.

And—he thinks as he washes his skinny legs and inspects his calves for bug bites—this is all theoretical anyway. He has time before he really has to think about any of this—or, at least, before he’ll even be able to have sex safely, medically speaking. And he can work up to things that involve the ass, he doesn’t have to jump straight into the deep end right away. Richie might be accustomed to more _advanced_ partners, out in Los Angeles, but he’s already shown that he can be patient. Eddie has some time for research.

* * *

Maybe a little more red-faced than usual, Eddie speedwalks in his towel to the guest room. Because Richie slept here last night, he’s a little afraid that he’ll close the door and turn around to find Richie lounging on the bed, looking up at him. But he’s alone.

He dresses— _again_ —in clean clothes and some of his more laidback dress pants. Not the navy ones—those he lost to the Derry sewers, which annoys him—but some of the more wide-legged ones that drape elegantly over the tops of his work shoes. It’s about as close as he can come to leisurewear.

He puzzles about where his laundry basket went before he remembers that he dragged it out to the living room, and then he gathers up his dirty clothes and his used towel and stares at the unmade bed. Is Richie going to want to sleep here tonight? Should Eddie put on new sheets? Should he suggest that they move to the king-size bed in Ben’s master suite? What will make Richie the most comfortable? And, because Eddie is a little attached to that spider plant, will Richie make fun of him if he carries it to Ben’s room before getting ready for bed in there?

Fully dressed, he opens the door to his guest room and peers across the hall into the one Richie has been using. Richie hasn’t made that bed either. The sheets still lie in a tangle, one pillow pummeled into submission on one side of the mattress. Eddie’s not surprised. He looks back between his bed and Richie’s, trying to decide if there’s any substantial difference between the sets of sheets, and wondering if Ben’s bed will meet Richie’s requirements for sheets, and then if Richie even _has_ requirements, because despite Richie seeming like he has the money for luxuries he doesn’t seem to avail himself of them. Sure, he got that souped-up rental car at the Bangor airport, but he bought a Subaru to take Eddie on a road trip.

Richie deserves some nice things, Eddie thinks. Richie deserves to sleep in a king-size bed, for one. Eddie will ask him if he wants to sleep in the master bedroom tonight, just like Ben suggested.

He carries his heap of laundry out to the living room. Richie is not there. Neither is the laundry basket. Eddie looks around, perplexed, wondering if he moved the basket again and forgot about it. He paces all the way down to the dining room section of Ben’s architectural experiment and finds neither Richie nor basket, but the dishes are already in the dishwasher and the frying pan soaks in the sink. The towel they used to soak up the water on the recliner is also gone.

Eddie drops his laundry over the stairway banister so that he doesn’t have to puzzle out walking down the steps with his arms full. Then he picks his way down, one step at a time, holding on to the banister. The effect is very much like a debutante descending a flight of stairs before a ball. He scowls absently the whole way down, reprimanding himself for watching too many movies.

Richie is indeed on the second level. This floor is partially underground and therefore not the fishbowl of the upper story of Ben’s house. He looks to the right and sees all the way back to Ben’s bar. In front of it is the entertainment area—a slightly less nice couch, a second TV, and a big open space in which Richie, headphones in, is doing something that could be called dramatic walking.

Eddie pauses three steps from the bottom of the stairs to watch him.

He’s definitely dancing. Richie’s eyes are mostly shut, except for when he has to look out for furniture, but he doesn’t seem to notice Eddie yet as he turns on his heel, bobs his head, and generally grooves to whatever he’s listening to in his headphones.

A glance toward the laundry room shows his basket waiting in front of the washing machine, ready when he is. Eddie looks at the clothes strewn at the foot of the stairs and decides they can wait. He sinks down on the stair and leans forward a little to watch Richie, waiting to see if he notices him.

When he turns back around, he does, but his only acknowledgement is the corner of his mouth quirking up. He does a real Charlie Brown sort of dance, hands close to his hips and parallel to the ground, shimmying a bit in place. It’s inviting. Eddie has no idea whether he’s on beat or not. Richie grins a little wider and beckons him over, and Eddie has to meet the challenge. So he hauls himself to his feet and walks over to him.

Richie takes one earbud out of his ear and offers it to Eddie. Eddie carefully does not inspect it for any buildup of wax and dirt, but tries to put it in his ear without thinking about it. Richie continues dancing in place, taking small steps in recognition of how he’s bound them together at the ears. New World Order sings that _I feel fine, I feel good_.

“You missed ‘The Love Cats,’” Richie says.

Eddie was never that into The Cure, knowing only some of their biggest hits. Richie, though, went mad for them in the eighties, back when they were still fringe. He puts his hands up so that Richie can take hold of them and walk him backward and forward in place.

“You wanna learn how to salsa?” Richie asks.

“I can’t keep up,” Eddie syas.

“We’ll go halftime. It’s eight steps, and then I’ll show you Diego Luna in _Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights_ , and you’ll get it.”

Eddie squints at him. “Who’s Diego Luna?”

“I’d tell you not to be jealous, but you should definitely be jealous,” Richie says. “Here. Step back, two, three, four. Forward, six, seven, eight. That’s it. There you go. What are you doing?”

“Laundry,” Eddie replies, amused.

“I’ll help if you wait until the end of the song.”

“Yeah, okay,” he agrees. “It can wait.”

And he lets Richie walk him, very slowly, back and forth in Ben’s basement behind the couch, and pretends they’re dancing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey! Sorry it took three weeks for me to get a new chapter out, but if you see the length of this behemoth, I'm sure you understand why. And it originally started out in reverse order, so I had to work on it longer than I would normally.
> 
> Thanks to [qianwanshi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/qianwanshi/pseuds/qianwanshi) for advice on the bandage scene and Richie's eventual _Hot Ones_ interview. Richie cleaning his wings was their idea.


	23. You Need This

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Scenes of domesticity: Richie and Eddie go grocery shopping, and Richie thinks about blowjobs. Eddie thinks about something else.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings: explicit sexual content. Mentions of trauma (It). Medical anxiety. Food and eating; food safety anxiety; mention of food allergies. Discussion of parental child abuse. A goy writing a goy and a non-observant Jewish man discussing Jewish holidays--all errors are mine. Awkwardness. Richie accidentally triggers Eddie into a fight-or-flight response. Murder discussion. Jokes about animal death ( _Of Mice and Men_ by John Steinbeck). Mention of misogyny in stand-up comedy and Richie's culpability thereof. ADHD symptoms. Canonical child murder (It; Georgie). Eddie smacks Richie without discussing it beforehand and Richie makes a BDSM joke. Eddie gets overwhelmed by choice. Blowjob jokes. Emeto warning: Eddie wakes up nauseated and dry heaves, but does not actually vomit. Nocturnal arousal. Masturbation in shower; fantasizing. Embarrassment.

Sometime after July, 1989—after It—Eddie found that being clean actually did make him feel better. Up until then it had seemed like a trap, or maybe something that his mother claimed but that Eddie never felt the truth of in his body. As an adult, Eddie found lots of back-rationalizations for it—the mammalian dive reflex, stimulated blood flow, active parasympathetic nervous system, the fact that neither Sonia nor Myra ever made demands of him while he was in the shower. But now, he suspects, that it was Its fault. A nice hot shower was an affirmation that he was not a child in a stinking freezing sewer, fighting his gag reflex and sick with fear. He always emerged smelling good, knowing that he was clean and safe and dry and alone, and somehow it armed him for the excruciating routine that his life became.

Is it possible that fighting It, by being defiantly himself, shaped him in some way and made him more ready to become what Sonia and everyone else wanted him to be?

But washing up makes him feel better, the way that cleaning up makes him feel better, the way that a suck on the camphor-flavored water vapor in his inhaler would doubtless make him feel better if he still had one. He doesn’t trust himself to have one. Instead he blows into the incentive spirometer and tracks the numbers, reassures himself that he’s making progress even when his numbers are plateauing, even when the improvement is a matter of decimal points and he has to lie down dizzy and red-faced to recover.

And the fact of the matter is that being clean is safer. It’s not the illusion of safety—it’s protection from infection, which isn’t an issue of perspective or of hypochondria, it’s something that has already happened to him with these incisions and is that much more likely to happen again, except if it happens again the infection will probably be harder to clear because it will have developed resistance to the treatment that worked last time. Eddie himself isn’t dirty—he doesn’t have to be dirty the way that Sonia always claimed he was—but he does have a gaping hole in his chest.

Eddie loves Richie for telling him that he’s braver than he thinks he is, but there’s a difference between bravery and stupidity. His true acts of bravery cost him, every time, and Eddie doesn’t regret that. Throwing the spear to save Richie’s life was a justifiable risk, because watching Richie die in front of him when he could have done something would have been… worse psychological torment than anything It showed him. He doesn’t regret getting injured in the effort to kill It and save his friends. He doesn’t know if that’s what people mean when they say that something is _worth it_ , because it’s hard to put a value on his suffering when he doesn’t truly understand its full extent. But he’s not fucking sorry.

He wants to be Eds, but if Eds dies for a third time of a completely avoidable secondary infection, he suspects he’s going to arrive at the pearly gates and punch out Saint Peter and then have a few stern words with God. He likes that Winston Churchill quote about meeting his maker, because he likes the interpretation of _meet_ not as an _to meet for the first time_ but rather to _meet on the field of battle_. Eddie has some practice fighting gods, after all.

So Edward and Eds bicker about his stupid coping mechanisms as Eddie makes the bed and opens the blinds and cracks the windows to air out the room, because it makes him feel better. He has control issues. Everybody and their mother knows that he has control issues. If he could work out how to open the floor-to-ceiling windows in Ben’s monstrosity of a house, he’d probably do that too.

Instead, he sits on the bottom stair and feels the ache in his back from sitting upright and watches Richie load laundry into the washing machine. Bending his torso in any dramatic way is a no-go at this stage in his recovery, and while both washer and dryer are up on pedestals and somewhat more accessible, the basket is short. After blacking out this morning, he’s decided to take it easy for the rest of the day.

As though the universe wants to reward him for making a good choice, his current vantage point gives him an excellent view of Richie’s ass as he bends to pick clothes up out of the basket, then stands to throw them into the drum.

Honestly, Eddie’s not sure if he’s being creepy enough. Is he allowed to sit here and objectify Richie? There are moments when Richie seems to invite it, but if Richie’s just trying to mind his own business, Eddie’s leery about making him uncomfortable. And about getting caught. Eddie’s just coming to understand a sort of aesthetic attraction to Richie. He can look at Richie’s turned back, and the taper of his trapezius down towards his spine, and the spread of his shoulders, and think, _Oh, it all makes sense somehow_.

Eddie’s body has always been something that he measures out in spoonfuls and milligrams and daily doses. Richie’s body, though—he’s not sure where to start.

“So I’ve been thinking,” Richie says.

Eddie, interrupted in contemplating the back pockets of Richie’s jeans, almost startles. “Huh?”

“You don’t have to sound so scared. I am almost always capable of thinking without supervision these days.”

Eddie sincerely doubts that and he waits for Richie to turn around, putting on the air of a civilized human being just in case. But Richie doesn’t straighten up. Instead, he inclines his head further and peers at Eddie upside-down from under his own arm. One eye is visible behind its black plastic glasses frame.

The motion is an odd one, strangely birdlike for someone as large as Richie. Abruptly Eddie flashes back to years spent on playgrounds with him, watching him contort himself on jungle gyms, hang from his knees on the monkey bars, race to the top of the slide. They used to compare calluses on their palms, gloating over whose were larger and yellower and tougher.

And then Eddie blinks and sees him as he is again, barefoot in jeans and the black t-shirt, sleeve so tight around his upper arm that Eddie can see the contour from deltoid to tricep to elbow to flexor.

“What are you doing?” he asks.

“Spying back,” Richie says, and then stands up straight.

Eddie’s whole face explodes into flame, but Richie’s expression remains relaxed and unbothered. He returns his focus to the task at hand, throwing the last of the clothes into the washer and closing the door. As he turns the dial he rests his other hand on his lumbar spine.

“You want everything on _sanitize_ , right?”

“Tell me you’re joking,” Eddie says quickly. He just bought a bunch of new shorts. If Richie shrinks them until they can slip between particles of matter, he’ll never get to wear them and it’s unlikely he’ll get his money back.

“Of course I’m kidding,” Richie replies easily.

Just in case, Eddie tries to sit up even taller so he can look over Richie’s shoulder as he sets the wash. Richie’s too broad for that, and when he turns back around Eddie tries to play innocent and pretend that he has total confidence in Richie’s ability to do laundry. Richie wears lots of patterns, right? He has to know how to keep his colors from bleeding. Eddie has to trust in the ridiculousness of Richie’s wardrobe.

“You know how we’re out of bacon?” Richie asks.

“Yes,” Eddie mopes, though he still has Thai food in the fridge.

“I think we should make a grocery run. Eat what we want, leave everything else for Ben and Bev when they come back from Location Redacted. If they haven’t, like, eloped or something.”

“I don’t think people who are still legally married can elope,” Eddie says.

Then he catches himself and frowns at the little reminder of Myra. He really hasn’t done much to progress his own divorce for a little bit. He knows that he has time, and honestly he has plenty of distractions—one in excess of six feet right in front of him—but the very idea of vetting lawyers is exhausting. He’s procrastinating, even though he knows he’ll feel better when he cuts that tie.

“Yeah, but like, what is the law, anyway?” Richie asks, straight-faced. Eddie stares at him for a long moment before he breaks and says, “I’m kidding. I mean, I’m an ax-murderer, but I’m also kidding.”

It’s unfortunate that United States law doesn’t have any leeway for people who are actively defending other humans against child-devouring alien incursions. Eddie feels like the universe owes them some wiggle room. It’s not like Eddie needing to get a divorce is so bad that he should get some get-out-of-jail-free card—Myra’s nowhere near as bad as Henry Bowers, or It—but Bev should be allowed to do whatever she wants. He doesn’t know a lot of the details about her marriage to Tom Rogan, and he suspects that if he did they would just upset him. But the dark looks that Richie got when he asked him about it means that Richie knows something, which means that Bev talked to _someone_ about it.

“You’re not an ax-murderer,” Eddie says with greater confidence. “Murder requires premeditation.” And since Richie killed Bowers in the process of saving Mike’s life, there have to be some mitigating circumstances there. A shiver of unease goes through him as he considers their odds with the Penobscot County legal system, but he lets out his breath slowly and reminds himself that the point is moot anyway. Bowers is rotting in the clubhouse.

Eddie hates that Bowers is in the clubhouse.

Richie compresses his lips into a tight line until they go white, and then he relaxes. Then he widens his eyes and puts on a strange high pitched voice: “Manslaughter. The slaughter of a man.”

Eddie blinks once and then says, “Is that Seinfeld?”

Richie looks pleased.

“Don’t do Seinfeld,” Eddie says definitively.

Richie sighs. “That brick-oven pizza motherfucker. Anyway, what do you want to eat for the next week? Besides leftover Thai.”

“Is leftover Thai good reheated?” he asks. Dry microwaved rice is one of the great travesties of cuisine. Eddie doesn’t even use microwaves that frequently, still a little anxious about radiation after a lifetime of Sonia’s and then Myra’s paranoia.

This time Richie widens his eyes in intensity. “Yah-huh,” he says gravely.

Well, that’s one meal out of about fifteen taken care of, not counting all of his various snacks between naps.

Eddie has trouble thinking about food. He’s okay with thinking about taste—he knows when things taste good, he’s capable of being in the mood for certain foods because he wants the taste—but his sense of hunger is all out of whack since he left the hospital. His stomach and mouth have different agendas. His stomach is far more subject to his painkillers and the trauma of its neighboring organs.

“I don’t know,” he says. “Calories and protein.”

He feels like the engine of a train. Like he has to shovel coal into it to make it run. He has to give his body fuel for healing, and until the moment he’s putting food in his mouth— _Irish nachos frozen yogurt cinnamon bun pizza biscuits and gravy hot chocolate bacon pad Thai egg sandwiches_ —the dining experience seems irrelevant to him.

“I, uh—there are suggested menus on my discharge papers,” he offers, vaguely remembering recommendations about ice cream and milkshakes and portion sizes. Does he want ice cream now? He could just have ice cream. It doesn’t have to be an event with the rest of the Losers at a frozen yogurt bar to celebrate their survival.

Richie’s chin lifts a little and he looks at Eddie very solemnly. “Do you mean to tell me,” he says slowly and severely, “that I’ve been your personal fry cook for two weeks, wracking my brains for what to feed you without you getting sick of it _or_ me, and you’ve had a cheat sheet this whole time?”

Oh. Oh, Eddie didn’t think about the inconvenience at all.

He draws his elbows a little tighter to his sides and tries to sit up a little straighter on the step. He wants to retreat under something, but he’s about as exposed as he can be right now. He didn’t realize that doing all of the cooking was such an imposition on Richie—but he should have, of course he should have, it’s obvious now. Eddie really can’t stand long enough to do it himself, but they could have ordered delivery more. There have to be some options out here.

Richie said he didn’t mean what he said about caretaking, about Eddie forcing people into Sonia’s role so that he could resent them for it. But it struck a nerve. The Losers’ Club of 1989 knows him well enough to hit him where it hurts.

“Sorry,” he blurts. “Sorry, I didn’t—I didn’t mean to—sorry.”

Richie’s eyes soften immediately. “Eds, I’m kidding,” he says quickly. “I’m just not that fucking creative, I’ve been going, _god, Eddie’s gotta be sick of fried shit_.”

He swallows. “I like your food,” he offers, trying to smooth the awkwardness.

Richie makes bacon just the way he likes it. Even if he’s queasy—and sometimes he goes so long between meals that his stomach bypasses _hunger_ signals entirely and goes straight into _nausea_ —sometimes just smelling it cooking is enough to remind him that he’s not sick, he’s hungry.

Honestly, Richie could probably have a decent career as a short-order cook if he wanted. He made _hash_ the other day, something Eddie has never had before: meat and cheese and potatoes with scrambled egg, all spiced and flavorful. Eddie only managed about a third of it and had to surrender the rest to Richie to prevent food waste, but Richie didn’t seem to mind. He even ate off of Eddie’s fork.

“Well, thanks.” Richie looks surprised by the compliment. “Probably for the best that you’re a guy. No woman I know is okay with eating the same thing three days in a row.”

Eddie flushes a little without knowing why. He shoots back, “How many women do you even know?”

“At least three,” Richie replies easily. “ _Pbbbblease_ , Eddie, can I see your cheat sheet?”

Eddie has the vague idea that that’s a reference to something—it has to be—but it escapes him at the moment.

The discharge papers are in the guest room on the dresser next to the spider plant, lying face-down so that all of the information about Eddie himself is hidden. Just the contact info for the hospital is visible. It’s not that Eddie was consciously hiding the papers from Richie, but maybe he was subconsciously. Or maybe he was and then he was trying to convince himself that he wasn’t.

He gets up slowly and stiffly, wincing. If he asked, he knows that Richie would try to help him up, but it’s surprisingly difficult without being able to lift his arms. He turns and starts hiking up the stairs, not looking at Richie. He’s a little afraid of finding pity in his face.

Richie follows up him the stairs and doesn’t seem to mind when Eddie has to take a break to catch his breath. Instead he walks to the kitchen and Eddie hears the fridge doors open.

When he feels steadier, he gets up and goes to retrieve his papers. He flips through the pages and detaches just the _Eating Well During Your Recovery_ section, leaving his actual medical information on the dresser. Face-down.

He meets Richie in the kitchen and passes the paperwork to him, then lurches into place on a barstool and leans down. He used to have such good posture, but just being upright sometimes winds him.

“Tired?” Richie asks, picking up the handout.

Without bothering to look up, Eddie sticks his tongue out at him and hears Richie’s answering huff of laughter.

There are a few quiet moments where Richie turns pages. Eddie looks up at him to watch him peer through his glasses. Richie almost sneers when he focuses, like he’s trying to get his nose out of the way. Eddie feels absurdly fond of him.

“What the fuck is double milk?” Richie asks.

Eddie, who read through his paperwork at discharge as soon as his eyes could focus properly, makes a face. “Powdered milk dissolved in whole milk,” he says, disgusted. “I’m not drinking that. Whole milk is already fucking awful.”

“Skim milk tastes like water.”

“It’s better for you!”

Richie waves the papers at him. “Not for you!”

He returns to his reading, squinting further and then sliding his glasses all the way down to the end of his nose. The effect is oddly professorial. Eddie’s heart thuds in his chest, but he does nothing about it, just keeps watching him. If he enjoys looking at Richie, he’s just going to keep doing that.

“I could probably make burgers,” Richie concedes. “There are, like, tutorials for that on YouTube. I probably can’t kill you with that.” He looks up at Eddie over the frames of his glasses. “Would you eat burgers if I made them?”

Eddie has some issues with bleeding meat, but if Richie uses a meat thermometer and requires the minimum internal temperature to kill bacteria and potential parasites, it should be safe enough. Beef is far safer to gamble with than chicken or pork; he’d eat pink beef before he’d eat pink poultry.

“I mean, I was sold on it until you started speculating about whether you could kill me with them,” he replies. He wants to shrug but his shoulders are stiff; instead he flicks his palms open. “You don’t have to cook if you don’t want. We can order in, if you’re tired.”

Richie’s eyebrows go up. “Did I say I was tired?”

“Yes.”

Richie frowns a little and his gaze flicks into the middle distance. “Yeah, well, I say a lot of things, I’m not tired.” His voice is grouchy but not unfriendly. “Have you ever known me to suffer in silence? About anything?”

There’s not much that Richie does in silence. He’s still peering over his glasses and now he’s being imperious about it. The tension in Eddie’s gut squeezes into a prolonged interior squirm. He swallows. Is he anxious or turned on? Or anxious _because_ he’s turned on? The line is a fine one.

He opens his mouth to say _I wish you’d suffer in silence_ , but he doesn’t, really. He likes Richie to talk. He revises it and says honestly, “No, you’re loud as fuck.”

But he hides things, too.

Richie’s mouth twists up when he smiles, apparently pleased. “And don’t you forget it.” He looks back down at the paperwork. “I’ll ask Ben and Bev if there’s anything they want us to pick up.” He looks up again and leans down on the counter, propping up on an elbow and resting more at Eddie’s eye level. “If I go grocery shopping tomorrow, do you want to come with me?” His tone is almost sweet.

Eddie is baffled by the invitation—not because it’s unexpected, but because Richie seems to be trying to make it _appealing_ by getting on Eddie’s level and using his inside voice. Given the choice between waiting for an unknown period of time for Richie to come back from running errands _on Eddie’s behalf_ , and going to the grocery store and being able to buy whatever the fuck they want, the choice is obvious.

“Yeah,” he says. It comes out like _Duh._

Richie smiles that twisty smile again, one eye scrunching up in apparently genuine happiness. There’s a line that stretches from the corner of that eye to midway down his cheek; it’s more than a crow’s foot and less than a laugh line. This is how Richie’s face will wrinkle, when it gets around to wrinkling properly. All his happiness will be inscribed on his skin. But right now it just gives the impression of his smile taking up his whole face.

He shakes the sheaf of papers at him again. “This says you should be eating a fuckton of ice cream.”

Ice cream has its appeal; a fuckton of it is sort of intimidating. When it’s a luxury or Eddie spoiling himself, sneaking a little of it seems indulgent and rebellious. When Richie suggests it, Eddie remembers that his insides are not thrilled about dairy right now. He makes a face and lets Richie interpret that as he will.

They will go grocery shopping. It’s not unreasonable to expect that to take at least half an hour—almost certainly more considering the pace that Eddie has to walk. He can brace himself on the cart, and Richie will walk around with him and take up the aisles with his broad shoulders and squint through his glasses at labels and probably sneak ridiculous things into their haul when Eddie isn’t looking, and Eddie will find them at checkout and be amused.

The picture he’s painting causes a small pleasant flutter in his stomach. Yes, he wants to go grocery shopping with Richie. He might be exhausted at the end of it, but not because it will be an ordeal. Richie is full of good ideas, and Eddie is ready to try new things.

It should be pathetic that he’s excited about grocery shopping, but Eddie has no patience for his own judgment right now.

* * *

They’re on the couch being lazy again—Eddie with his head on Richie’s lap and staring idly at the television, watching a fight scene taking all in one long tracking shot down a hallway and in and out of various rooms—when Richie says, “Also, Mags wants to know if we’re stopping by on our way back up to Bangor.”

Eddie blinks, distracted by the main character slamming a human trafficker into a wall. It takes him a moment to process what Richie just said.

“Oh,” he says. “Does she want us to visit?”

“Uh, she had a kid, she’s kind of in it for the long haul. Yeah, my mom wants us to visit.”

A spasm of less ambiguous anxiety tightens Eddie’s chest. He takes a breath—it’s not that Maggie Tozier wants _them_ to visit, it’s that she wants _Richie_ to visit. Eddie doesn’t want to be a bother. Right now all he can think of is that he woke up Richie’s mom by getting sick like a kid at a sleepover. It’s embarrassing. And Richie almost certainly won’t want to share a bed in his parents’ house.

If he wants to keep sharing a bed with Eddie at all, after the weird wakeup call this morning and then the subsequent fight.

But does Richie want to see his parents? Eddie can make sacrifices, if it means that the Toziers will go through the inconvenience of hosting him just so that they get to see their son twice in one month.

“We can,” he says. “I don’t mind. I like your parents.”

This might be something of an overstatement. They seem like nice people, but Eddie finds it difficult to _understand_ parents. He always has. He doesn’t really remember Frank at all, and Maggie is so different from Sonia that categorizing them both under the umbrella of _mothers_ seems wrong somehow. The interesting thing about Maggie and Went is watching them and finding the blueprints for Richie’s behavior: Maggie’s attitude, Wentworth’s sense of humor. Their combination is an intensity greater than the sum of its parts—the places where Richie split off from home, from the Losers, from Derry, and went to LA and became somebody all his own. Richie, Richie, Richie.

“My parents like you,” Richie says. Eddie has no idea what to make of that, but Richie’s fingers are combing through Eddie’s hair in fidgety little movements that suggests he’s not totally aware he’s doing it. Eddie tries not to move so that he’ll keep petting him. “Well, Maggie does. Jury’s still out on whether _the pater_ —” He inexplicably pitches into a received pronunciation English accent, and then drops back into his own voice. “—likes things.”

“He likes your mom,” Eddie says. He barely knows the Toziers, but that’s indisputable.

Wentworth is sweet and teasing toward Maggie, at least in front of people. Eddie has had precious few role models for husbands, and even fewer for fathers. He feels a little like a nature documentarian: _this is how the man who loves his wife behaves after forty-some years together_. If he’d seen healthier marriages more often, how long would it have taken Eddie to realize that his own was unsustainable?

He can’t decide why things were so different (besides the obvious). It’s not that he and Myra did things so differently—the Toziers ate dinner together, pizza on the couch in front of the TV, two things that remind Eddie of Sonia and that Myra would never do. The Toziers sleep in separate bedrooms and don’t seem bothered by it or self-conscious about Eddie knowing. Honestly, Eddie suspects he would have much preferred to have separate bedrooms from his wife. Look how much better he feels when they’re sleeping in separate parts of the state. Maybe some of the pressure of sexual performance goes away when the couple hit their sixties or seventies? The Toziers ate breakfast together at the table and talked about what Maggie was reading, though Myra would never admit to reading _erotic literature_ , let alone discussing it in mixed company.

It’s not like Richie’s parents are some kind of romantic comedy couple. For one, they’re older; for another, they haven’t seen their son in decades and they don’t know that he’s gay. Eddie saw them for an evening and has no real grasp of what their everyday life must be like, so he doesn’t understand why his brain is reinterpreting them as some kind of ideal.

It’s just that Wentworth’s casual use of “Maggie my love” felt so sincere.

“That he does,” Richie says. He leans back a little further on the couch, but his hands are still in Eddie’s hair. “I don’t know if my dad has ever actually watched any of my stuff.” He sounds contemplative, and then he sits up and his tone goes more alert. “Wait, I think it’s almost Rosh Hashanah.”

Eddie’s brain is slow and doesn’t want to switch tracks, and the bloodied vigilante on TV is panting and catching his breath. He also has a vague idea that a lot of Jewish holidays are less about celebration and more about remembering tragedies. Tentatively, he says, “Oh. Does your dad… observe Rosh Hashanah?”

“Not really,” Richie says. “Like, when I was seven or eight, he cut up apples for me and dipped them in honey. It wasn’t like a real holiday for us, but I was all for it because—you know, it was an excuse to eat candy.”

“Uh-huh,” Richei says. “And if I were to ask, uh, what is Rosh Hashanah…?”

“Hang on, I’m checking the date.” Eddie can’t see him from this angle, but Richie’s glued to his phone at all times. “Ha! I was right! It’s on Sunday.” He shifts as he puts his phone down and then rests his hands atop Eddie’s head again. “Lunar new year. Lots of food. You and your sweet tooth will like it. _Oooooh_. You can’t stop my parents from cooking for you.”

Eddie’s low-level of apprehension kicks into high gear. Is there a way out of inconveniencing the Toziers? Or would it be culturally insensitive to refuse an invitation to celebrate with them? Does he have to call Stan and Patty and ask how to behave properly? Or should he just Google that himself and not inconvenience the Urises? He knows that Stan and Patty are more observant than Dr. Tozier—shrimp aside—but he suspects he’s going to have to follow Wentworth’s lead.

“Am I… allowed?” he asks.

Richie shrugs. “I don’t know, man, if he says you are, then you are. Speaking of sweet stuff, your doctors say you’re supposed to be drinking caffeine-free soda.”

Most doctors are not trained as dentists, and even caffeine-free soda is very hard on the teeth. Eddie has been sticking mostly to water, with occasional indulgences since he’s been led to believe that everything _except_ water dehydrates you. But if it’s on his medical papers…

“Need more Sprite,” he says.

“Can do, LeBron,” Richie replies.

Eddie nods and they continue watching the vigilante gearing up for his second wind.

* * *

For hours, Eddie _dithers_ , thinking about clean bedding and pajamas and the spider plant. He sleeps a lot, so at this point the distinctions between day and night seem to be polite diction at best. Eventually he gets up, takes his dose of nighttime painkillers, and moves the spider plant from the guest bedroom into the master suite. Then he panics and moves it back into the guest bedroom. Then he feels stupid and turns to go back to the guest bedroom to move the spider plant again.

“Whatcha doing?” Richie asks, leaning in from the living room to watch Eddie anxiously pace at the other end of the hallway.

“Uh,” Eddie says. He feels more put on the spot than he would have expected, considering that he’s been working himself up to ask Richie a question basically all day. He comes back into the living area and glances at the cable box, looking at the clock, and is briefly startled by the hour. It’s 11:12PM. He didn’t realize how easily distracted he is by television.

“Uh,” Richie repeats. Then he plays with the sound, stretching it out in an exaggerated Eddie impersonation. _“Uhhh?”_

“Uh,” Eddie repeats.

Richie adds tones to it, going up and then down again. “ _Uh_ -hhh.” It almost sounds like a moan.

“Stop,” Eddie says.

Richie grins.

“So,” Eddie manages. “I wanted to ask if. I mean, how did you feel when you woke up this morning? I mean.”

He winces at himself, remembering his mother and Myra asking him, _How are you, Eddie-bear?_ when he got up for breakfast. Eddie learned quickly to be boring in his responses, not giving them any material to grab onto, and when they couldn’t extrapolate problems from his words, they started making assumptions based on the way he held his head, the amount of sugar in his breakfast cereal (which was next to none), and how often he yawned.

“That’s not what I meant,” he corrects himself. He woke Richie up very early because he was convinced that there was someone else in the house with them. It’s not an appropriate data sample for how sharing a bed with Eddie makes Richie feel. “Actually, I mean… Uh.”

“Uh,” Richie agrees.

“I’m going to bite your lip off your face,” Eddie says without thinking.

“When do we start?” Richie asks, sounding delighted.

Eddie rolls his eyes and then averts them. “I just wanted to know—do you want to, uh.” Richie is giggling to himself. “Shut up! _Where_ do you want to sleep tonight?”

The _shut up_ was counterproductive, because it makes Richie laugh harder, but he sobers up when Eddie finally blurts out the question. “Oh,” he says.

Eddie looks back at him to find that Richie is watching him. He gets absolutely nothing out of his expression.

He begins doing what he does best: filling in the space. “Because Ben suggested that I take the master bedroom, because it has the master bath with it, and I think because it has clean sheets on it, and it’s been—it’s been over a week. When do normal people change their sheets?”

“I don’t know,” Richie replies. “Like, on the spectrum of sheet changing—like, we’re on opposite ends of the bell curve, right? Like, you’re changing them too much, and I’m not changing them enough, probably.”

That’s a mildly upsetting train of thought. Eddie can’t decide whether Richie—who has already announced that he sleeps naked, which is a _deeply absorbing_ train of thought that Eddie has to recoil from immediately—not wearing pajamas would make his sheets more or less clean in the long term. Probably less clean, right? Or does Eddie sweat more because he has the insulation of his pajamas? Either way, there’s absolutely body oils and sweat dried all over Richie’s sheets, right?

_What do Richie’s sheets smell like?_

“So, it’s late,” Eddie says. He glances at the clock again to see if time is granting him a favor by accelerating. It isn’t. It’s 11:14PM. “And I wanted to know if. If you wanted to, you know. Sleep with me. In bed! Share the bed with me, and just.”

He blinks several times and considers leaping through one of the massive windows. With his luck, he’d just bounce off.

Richie looks at him, then reclines all the way back on the couch and crosses his legs, smirking.

“What?” Eddie asks.

“No, keep going, this is good material,” Richie says.

“Fuck you!” Eddie squawks.

Riche cracks up. “Are you asking me to cuddle?” he asks, tone almost mocking.

Eddie snaps back, “Yes.” It comes out oddly sulky.

He shocks Richie. “Oh,” he says in a totally different voice.

For a moment Eddie despairs, a curious sinking feeling happening somewhere in the vicinity of his solar plexus, ready for Richie to say _thanks but no thanks_.

Instead Richie uncrosses his legs again and says, “Oh. I mean, yeah, if that’s… If you want, I.”

“Yeah,” Eddie says, but the idea of Richie doing things _just because Eddie wants them_ makes him uncomfortable. “I mean, if you want to, I don’t… I mean.” He cringes and says, “I know that the guest bed has a firmer mattress, and you probably need a softer one because you sleep on your side, and I have to sleep on my side, but the… the support, for the next week or so—I don’t know if your back is already hurting you, or…”

Richie’s wonky eye is scrunched up, but this time in something like confusion. “Wait, why do I need a soft mattress?”

“Because you sleep on your side,” Eddie says again.

Richie continues to stare at him, nonplussed.

Eddie gestures at his own deltoids. “You know. The, uh. The shoulders.”

The corner of Richie’s mouth lifts in a smirk again. “No, I don’t know, actually. Why don’t you tell me?”

Eddie glares at him. “You have a lot of shoulder.” This can’t be a surprise to Richie, who has to live with them all the time and carry them through doorways and shit.

Richie’s smirk broadens into a smile. “And because of that, I need a softer mattress?”

“Yeah!” Eddie says. “Because you sleep on your side, and you’ve got these big shoulders, and if you’re on your side and your shoulder is—” He draws his own elbow close to his side and mimes crushing his shoulder into his ribcage. “—then you need a softer mattress, so you don’t end up with back problems!”

Richie, still smiling, tilts his head all the way back and looks down his nose at Eddie. It should look like arrogance, but he looks nothing but pleased. Triumphant, even. Maybe just because Eddie was thinking about him in bed. The jokes are there, just lining up. Eddie wonders if Richie even worries about his back support, considering how he was bracing himself when he was doing laundry earlier. When was the last time that Richie bought a mattress?

(Maybe Eddie can show him how to pick out a mattress?)

“Well, how do you sleep?” Richie asks.

Eddie’s sleep has been an issue since his asthma “diagnosis” decades ago. Back in the day, doctors recommended that asthma patients sleep on their stomachs, for fear that if they slept on their backs the weight of their ribcages and bodies would cause them to have trouble breathing. Nowadays Eddie doesn’t know if that’s true—something to do with the respective pressures in the chest cavity and outside the body, and sleep studies are always changing their minds about best practices—but he still feels a pulse of anxiety when he lies on his back.

But people who sleep on their backs can use just about any mattress and get satisfactory support along the spine. And if Richie needs a softer mattress—which he probably does, whether or not he knows it—then Eddie could sleep on a softer mattress. He has to sleep on his left side while he has incisions. He could easily sleep on a soft mattress with Richie, if Richie wanted to sleep on a soft mattress with him.

“However,” he replies. “I mean, the stitches.” He waves at his own torso.

“Yeah,” Richie says.

Eddie always thought that he didn’t like to be touched when sleeping, but he likes Richie pressed up against him. He’s pretty sure that heat is good for healing, for relaxing stiffness, for feeling physically and emotionally supported during recovery. Eddie has been the big spoon many times in his life, but he could get used to Richie putting his arms over Eddie like he did last night. Something about the rhythm of Richie’s snuffling breathing put him to sleep.

“So,” Eddie says, dragging himself back to the present. “If you want, I mean. I don’t know when you were planning on going to bed.”

“Well, some athletic little shrimp got me up super early,” Richie says.

The athletic little shrimp scowls at him, but his general nervousness returns. “Should we, um, sleep in the master bedroom? Because Ben said there’s the master bedroom, and the sheets are clean.” He’s been on his feet for too long; he shifts his weight onto his left leg and works his right ankle in a small circle.

“Well, if the sheets are clean,” Richie says. “I can’t be doing with unclean sheets, you know me.”

“I do know you,” Eddie agrees, completely ignoring the joke.

They stare at each other for long moments. Then Richie asks, “Are you tired now?”

Eddie’s answer comes out rawer and more desperate than he means it to: “I’m always tired.” He swallows and tries to say like a functioning human adult, “I mean, I just took my painkillers, so I’ll drop pretty soon. You don’t have to, though.”

He’d like for Richie to put him out of his misery. He’d also sort of like to be at the chapter in the bodice-ripper where the hero throws him over his broad shoulder and carries him off to bed, except that Eddie doesn’t really want to be a heroine in a bodice-ripper, and if Richie tried anything like that, both their spines would probably collapse. Richie is a forty-year-old comedian, and Eddie is still recovering from a torso-ripper.

“Oh,” Richie says, still just looking blankly at him. “Well, do you need me to—”

“No,” Eddie says quickly, because he doesn’t need Richie in order to get to sleep. He just… would like him, is all. If Richie’s not tired, Eddie’s not going to bully him into going to bed early.

Richie surveys him for a moment and then says, “Okay.” He grabs one of the three unnecessarily convoluted remotes and turns the TV off. It is a multi-step process.

“I mean, if you’re done,” Eddie says.

“Yeah, I’m good, I’ve seen it,” Richie says, like he hasn’t been sitting here by himself while Eddie fusses with the distribution of plants in Ben’s house.

Eddie deflates immediately. “You’ve seen it?”

“I watch a lot of TV.”

Richie stands up, sets the remote down next to its fellows, and jams his phone in his back pocket. Then he looks arounds, hands hovering like he’s searching for something. Eddie watches him step around the basket of folded laundry—every time he nodded off today he woke to find Richie folding and staring blankly at the TV, a show of competence that the wrinkly-clothed Richie from high school never could have pulled off. Richie picks barefoot across the living room, hooking empty mugs on his fingers. As he walks to the kitchen, he stops to right Woodie the Wooden Giraffe, who is again sprawling on the carpet at Goldie’s feet.

For some reason Eddie doesn’t realize until he hears the dishwasher lurch open that Richie is _tidying_. His stomach somersaults.

“You don’t have to,” he begins, and then trails off.

Richie pokes his head around the wall and into the kitchen. “Hm?” he asks, his eyebrows politely inquisitive.

In the hand Richie has braced on the wall is the deck of cards. Distracted, Eddie stands up straighter when he sees it.

“What?” Richie asks, and then follows Eddie’s line of sight and grins. “You want dinner and a show?”

“No,” Eddie lies, scowling.

“I can be magical in bed, baby.”

It’s meant to sound sleazy, so Eddie grimaces with disgust he doesn’t actually feel. “How long were you working on that line?”

“Like twenty-two years.”

He hums “Let Me Entertain You” as he crosses the living area again to close the automated shutters. Eddie happens to be nearer to the light switch, so he turns out the light while the blinds are still rolling up into place. Richie falls silent.

For a moment, in the dark, Eddie can see as though his eyes are perfectly adjusted. The house is transparent, and spreading out before them is the clearing and the lawn and then the trees, and over the dark pointed tops of the trees there’s a deep blue sky.

And then Eddie blinks, and the afterimage clouds his vision, and he turns the light back on.

Richie is looking at him. The white panels continue their mechanical climb behind him. “Did you forget how eyes work?”

Eddie shakes his head, still staring as the dark rectangles of the view slowly shrink over Richie’s shoulder. He can’t articulate what made him want to turn out the light before either of them was ready. He feels safe in this room with its glass windows, late at night, when just this morning he was terrified. For a split-second, Richie was a blue shadow against other darker shadows, and it was like there were no walls here at all, as if they could fly straight out against the lawn.

Sometimes, Eddie really did love the city. Those moments tended to happen late at night, when he was by himself. He liked hearing the trains go by, and the automated voices of the buses announcing their stops, and seeing rooftop parties happening in the distance and feeling small and secure as a witness to others’ glory.

When was the last time he was in his home and turned out the lights and looked out the window? He did it in Bangor, but that didn’t make him feel good and tranquil.

“Just wanted to see it dark,” he says, because that’s as much of an explanation as he has.

Richie doesn’t ask for clarification, but does move to start checking locks, going towards the back door. “Starting to think Haystack might be on to something.”

Eddie isn’t sure. He shakes his head. “I don’t know. I’m going to go brush my teeth.” He turns as briskly as he can on his tired legs and walks down the hall again, thinking, _What was that?_ the whole way.

He brushes his teeth carefully and rinses with salt water. Thinking about trying to schedule a dental appointment makes his lungs constrict with anxiety, so he takes a few deep breaths and tries to figure out if this is the eustress that wants him to solve a problem or the distress that wants him to run screaming away from medical offices.

He should ask Richie what days they’re going to be at his parents’ house, and then he should call that dentist that Dr. Tozier recommended and see if he’ll be in the office and can fit in an emergency tooth pulling that Eddie has put off for an unacceptably long time. Or maybe he should call Dr. Tozier and ask if he can pull some strings, the way he offered the last time Eddie was there. Would that be taking advantage of an old man? Should Eddie even think about such things, if it makes him as exploitative as his mother, who insisted the rules never applied to her when it came to medical concerns?

Eddie tore into Richie for avoiding his real life outside of Eddie’s recovery, but honestly Eddie’s doing practically the same thing. He sent emails to work and received the expected horrified and slightly disbelieving response from his manager; he called Myra and told her that he wanted a divorce and then blocked her number; he hasn’t done much with the divorce lawyer recommendations that Bev sent over except let them sit in his inbox.

He washes his face and when he wipes his eyes he sees a figure standing behind him in the mirror. Immediately he drops to the floor and turns to put his back to the cabinet, covering his chest with his crossed arms. His heart pounds.

Richie also drops to the floor, hanging onto the doorframe. “Fuck, fuck, fuck!” he shouts. “It’s me! It’s me!”

“I know it’s you!” Eddie shouts back, breathless, but the problem is that his body doesn’t know that. He has to wait for the feeling to return to his chest so that he can take control of his breathing again.

Richie lets go of the doorframe and lies belly-up on the floor, the soles of his feet pointing toward Eddie. “Fuck,” he sighs, sounding exhausted.

Eddie doesn’t feel quite ready to stand, so he lets himself tip backwards onto his ass. His shoulder bang against the cabinet and he winces a little. He wipes at his wet face again.

“So I guess don’t do that,” he says when he has the breath.

“No, I got that,” Richie says. He lifts his head and peers down his whole body and across the room at Eddie.

As he calms, Eddie finds himself sort of amused that Richie’s response to Eddie’s panic is to mirror him, to share it, to put them on the same side again. It is very difficult to interpret a man lying prone in a bathroom doorway as a threat.

“At least I didn’t bang my face on the faucet,” Eddie says. If he said _It’s okay that you startled me, I know you didn’t do it on purpose,_ Richie would have to make fun of both of them.

Richie sits up enough to brace his shoulder on the doorframe and squints into the middle distance, clearly thinking. “Okay, bear with me here,” he says. “When you fuck up art, that’s defacement, right?”

“Right,” says Eddie, who only has the faintest idea of what property offenses regarding creative works might legally be categorized as.

“So if someone just—” Richie lifts both hands. He doesn’t even make a full fist, just sort of thumps the back of one hand into his other palm. “—smashed in Michelangelo’s _David_ —” He says it _dah-veed_ , playing with the vowels, before continuing. “—would that be defacement? Because he has a face?” He makes eye contact with Eddie again as though waiting for a response.

It’s such a flaccid underwhelming punchline that Eddie knows something else has to be coming.

Richie’s mouth trembles at the corners. “Or would that be too on-the-nose?” And then he grins.

Eddie thinks about his response very carefully, staring at him, and then he says, “I want you to sleep in the basement.”

Richie breaks out laughing and flops down on the floor again, too overcome to hold himself up. It feels like winning something, even as Eddie’s heart slows and steadies. The joke puts them on even ground again. Some of Eddie’s embarrassment trickles away—and honestly it’s hard to be embarrassed by the legitimate terror of Henry Bowers in his bathroom, because Eddie got stabbed in the face, and being stabbed in the face is not embarrassing. It’s a lot of thing, but embarrassing is not one of them. In fact, considering that Henry Bowers failed to murder him that day, Eddie thinks he handled that situation rather well.

“Okay,” he says, both to himself and to Richie.

He was in the middle of washing his face. He reaches up and touches his cheek, his fingertips reassuring him that his skin is intact and that his scar hasn’t opened back up again. There’s foam caught in the stubble on his jaw. He needs to go back and rinse. It’s a miracle he hasn’t blinded himself by getting the face wash in his eyes.

The mammalian dive reflex will help calm him down. He’ll put water on his face and then he’ll feel better. That’s how mammals work. Eddie will take refuge in being a mammal.

“Come stand next to me and protect me from murderers,” Eddie says, meaning for it to be a joke. Then he remembers the horrified look on Richie’s face when they all pushed through the doorway into the library and saw Mike and Richie standing over Bowers’ body. The blood on the hardwood.

But Richie looks blasé about it. He get up with much groaning and an alarming click from his hip, and then slouches over to the countertop and sits between the sinks. For some reason Ben has two sinks in his master bathroom as well as in his guest bathroom, for this home that he lives in by himself. Eddie doesn’t know if this is an architectural decision, or Ben’s preference, or if he considered the resell value, or if his whole life Ben has quietly been preparing space for other people in his home.

Is Eddie projecting? Eddie might be projecting.

He scrubs at his face again and then elbows Richie in the thigh. “Why are you so quiet?”

“It’s bedtime,” Richie says, and then pauses.

Eddie wipes his eyes clear and squints at him with one eye. Richie’s staring out into the middle distance again, his expression grim. That’s Richie regretting the things that come out of his mouth, though in this case Eddie’s not sure why.

“Are you good?” Eddie asks, and closes his eyes and finishes rinsing his face.

He feels around for the towel. Helpfully Richie puts it in his hands. Eddie pats his face dry and lifts his head. Richie is watching him.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

Eddie sets the towel down and reaches for the moisturizer. Because Richie is still watching him, Eddie side-eyes him as he spreads the moisturizer between his hands.

“Aren’t you gonna brush your teeth?” he asks.

Richie’s expression focuses and then the corner of his mouth twitches again.

Eddie narrows his eyes at him. “What?”

“Do you really, like, brush your teeth twice a day?” The voice he’s doing reminds Eddie of a frat guy on a college campus.

The idea that this is a bit—please let it be a bit—is what keeps Eddie from losing it entirely.

“Stop,” he says.

He applies the moisturizer. His skin feels better almost immediately. Having the hole in his face repaired just makes his life significantly better.

“Like, every day?”

“I have had my tongue in your mouth, don’t even joke.”

“Do you think that, like, flossing is a real thing too?”

“Sometiems I brush my teeth more than twice a day!” Eddie says. “Like when I take a nap and get morning breath at three in the afternoon! For you! That’s a courtesy brush!”

Richie breaks, clutching the edge of the counter and giggling.

Eddie elbows him in the thigh. “Brush your teeth! Come on!”

“Okay, hang on, my toothbrush is in the other bathroom.” He slides down off the counter.

That is not a joke, and Eddie looks at him in unrestrained horror. “You weren’t going to brush your teeth?”

Richie’s laugh as he leaves the room is somehow triumphant.

“Your dad is a dentist!”

“He’s retired!”

“You don’t get to retire from _brushing your teeth_!”

Eddie has no idea what to do once Richie has left the room. He’s just about done with his regular nighttime routine, and now he feels like he should stay in the bathroom. But he also feels like standing over Richie’s shoulder while he brushes his teeth is just weird, so maybe he should go sit in the bedroom.

Actually, this fluttering nervous apprehension feels a lot like Eddie did on his wedding night. Maybe marginally less exhausted from event planning and hosting. Definitely with the feeling that he should be doing something and he’s completely failing.

He decides to stop being weird and then realizes he hasn’t changed into his pajamas. So he gingerly closes the bathroom door, takes off his clothes, wipes the remainder of the moisturizer on his hands off on his shoulders, and puts on his pajamas.

There’s a tap on the door. “Eds?” Richie asks.

“Hang on,” Eddie says, and finishes buttoning his pajamas. He picks up his clothes and opens the door.

Richie is standing there, toothbrush in one hand and tube of toothpaste in the other, held up as though for Eddie’s approval. He has changed out of the red and black buffalo plaid pajama pants into gray sweatpants.

They use the same toothpaste. Richie didn’t even need to go get his toothpaste, because Eddie has the same toothpaste, but he didn’t presume. Eddie is pleased by both of these observations. Eddie always thought that he didn’t like sharing things, probably because he grew up as an only child, but now he can remember standing around with an ice cream cone in each hand, waiting for Richie to get back from whatever he was messing around with, occasionally licking around the edge to stop it from melting before Richie could take his cone back.

They used to _share ice cream cones_. Eddie used to lick ice cream cones that _Richie had already licked_. The _audacity_ of his younger self is astonishing.

“Do you need to review the ingredients list?” Richie asks, his eyebrow lifted for the tease.

“No, I know what’s on the ingredients list, we use the same toothpaste,” Eddie says.

Richie’s other eyebrow goes up to match. “Do you like that?” he asks, knowing and condescending at the same time. “Does that do it for you?”

Maybe.

“Do _what_?” Eddie almost squawks. “What kind of toothpaste pervert do you think I am?”

Richie grins. “Okay, hang on.”

He stuffs his toothbrush in his mouth, then takes Eddie by the shoulders and bodily rotates him so that they swap places, Eddie no longer blocking the way to the bathroom door. Richie squeezes his upper arms for a moment and then lets him go.

“Good?” he asks, voice muffled around the toothbrush in his mouth. He jabs a thumb behind him in the direction of the mirror. “Do you need to, like, critique my technique, or…?”

“No!” Eddie says, and walks away to put his clothes in the laundry basket. Then, because he’s at a loss for anything else to do, he sits down at the edge of the bed and folds his hands between his knees.

Richie is standing in the bathroom, only about half visible from Eddie’s position. Eddie can see one shoulder and watch him slouch over the sink. He turns the faucet off after he wets his toothbrush, instead of leaving it running while he brushes, and he applies the toothpaste _after_ wetting the brush instead of before. Both of these things seem strange and backwards to Eddie. Is the drought in California that bad? Maybe.

Eddie looks down at his own bare feet and then up again at Richie’s turned back. Then his brain flails a bit and catches on something, and he hops to his feet. “I forgot my plant!” He’s halfway out of the room before he realizes how ridiculous that sounds.

“Huh?” Richie asks, muffled, from the bathroom.

Eddie ignores him because he’s about to make it self-evident anyway, and goes back to the guest room to retrieve the spider plant. He carries it in its blue weatherproof pot back to the master bedroom and carefully sets it on the nightstand closest to the window. That’s the left side of the bed. Last night, Eddie slept on the left, but he’s used to sleeping on the right. Does Richie have a side he prefers?

Richie is humming to himself as he brushes his teeth. Eddie doesn’t recognize the tune—it’s not “Let Me Entertain You” again—but the scrub of his toothbrush accompanies him as percussion.

Eddie looks down at his body again, mentally running through his checklist. He took his painkillers on schedule; he brushed his teeth and washed his face; he’s wearing pajamas. He still feels like there’s something he should be doing, something that he’s forgetting about. He wonders if his body is so used to counting pills out of prescription bottles and putting them into caddies, splitting them evenly between morning, afternoon, and evening, that it misses the ritual. But this is the first time he’s thought about that in a while. He ate recently enough that he’s reasonably sure he won’t get sick from taking medication on an empty stomach. Leftover pad Thai is still very good reheated after all. He doesn’t think he’s hungry, he doesn’t need crackers or anything.

Richie’s humming breaks off for a moment. Eddie freezes as though caught in the middle of doing something that he shouldn’t, and then the noise resumes—this time in a gargling sound. Richie is gargling in tune with his song. Startled, Eddie laughs. The sharp motion hurts his ribs, but it doesn’t matter.

Richie goes quiet again and then spits into the sink. Before he can consciously process what he’s doing, Eddie climbs into bed—quickly, like he’s working on a time limit now.

What’s he so afraid of? Awkward as it probably will be when Richie comes out of the bathroom and they just stare at each other like idiots, neither of them is doing anything wrong. And even if Eddie were—today he tried and failed to throw a drink at Richie. It’s not like Eddie has to worry about Richie’s reaction.

His pulse is rabbiting.

_Oh_ , he realizes, pausing in the process of pushing his feet under the blankets. This is apprehension, reaching up from his gut and wrapping claws around his heart and lungs. He takes a few breaths, feeling the strain down his sternum. He knows that it’s partially psychosomatic. He wants to be in bed with Richie. And he’s scared, at the same time, of being in bed with Richie. Anticipation and fear.

Honestly, this is probably worse than Eddie felt on his actual wedding night. On his wedding night he had the refuge of them both being too exhausted to justify any expectations for each other.

Richie doesn’t have expectations for him either. Richie is aware that he has a perforated chest and a medical ban on sexual activity, and here Eddie is in his clean pajamas, pulling the blankets up over his lap. He feels like the husband on a 1950s domestic sitcom. One where the mother and father have to sleep in separate beds to keep the censors happy.

Except that there is one bed here and Richie agreed to share it with him but Richie also told Eddie upfront that he sleeps naked, and the change of clothes indicates that Richie probably isn’t going to sleep naked in this bed with him tonight, but the idea still has Eddie’s heart pounding and he suspects that the warmth across his back is stress sweat and not just being hot under the collar.

Richie comes out of the bathroom. The lights have a pleasant warm tone. Eddie didn’t think to turn out the overhead light, after his thoughtless mistake out in the living room. He has nothing to hide, but he’s very aware of how visible he is right now, how there’s nothing really to look at except each other and maybe the plant behind him. The plant could be a good thing. If Richie starts making fun of Eddie for carrying a plant to bed with him, like the world’s strangest security blanket, that at least would be something for them to talk about. Something to defuse the tension that has Eddie’s body on high alert, for all he doesn’t understand _why_. Richie is large but not frightening. It’s impossible to mistake him for a monster or Bowers or an actual threat.

Several feet from the bed, Richie comes to a stop and gives Eddie a somewhat hapless look. There’s a resigned twist to his mouth.

Maybe Richie doesn’t actually want to share a bed with him after all? Maybe Eddie’s pressuring him into doing something he wouldn’t otherwise do? Maybe Richie’s going along with it out of pity? Maybe Richie feels _sorry_ for Eddie, and how could he ever truly want someone he feels sorry for—?

“So,” Richie says. “I, uh. I’m not really a good, uh, bed partner.”

Eddie swallows. When the motion is done, his throat doesn’t want to relax. It wants to remain tightly shut. He remembers that sleepover in the tent on Stan’s lawn back in grade school. He woke up first thing in the morning and sat up to see Richie sucking his thumb in his sleep, having at some point half-twined around Bill’s camp bed.

“Do you still suck your thumb?” Eddie asks, because it’s the first thing he thinks of and he can take refuge in being an asshole.

Richie snorts, shoulders jerking up sharply and then relaxing. “Oh, go on, ask me about my oral fixation.”

Eddie is thrown enough by the contrast between the innuendo and his evaporating memory of Richie as a child that he wrinkles his nose in disgust. “I’m asking about your overbite,” he snipes back, feeling like he has to protect that mental image of a sleeping peaceful Richie.

“White man’s overbite,” Richie says, and hooks his front teeth over his bottom lip and shimmies a little in place. It looks nothing at all like his Charlie Brown dancing from earlier today, and seems random enough that Eddie grins a little in response and manages to relax against the stacked pillows. “Wentworth’s signature move,” Richie adds as he stills.

Eddie had no real objections to Richie as a bed partner last night, except for when he found Richie using his ass as a pillow. But he’s well-aware of Richie’s sleep-hugging tendencies; has sort of been looking forward to it, actually. It’s kind of endearing, and it’s not like Richie squeezed him and his injuries in his sleep.

“Are you still worried you’re going to roll on top of me and crush me?” he asks dryly. “To death?”

“I concede that you’re a sturdy motherfucker, but there’s still a chance I might go all Lenny on you in my sleep.”

Sturdy motherfucker that he is, Eddie stares at him, nonplussed.

“You know, _Of Mice and Men_ , the big guy who just wants to hold the cute little bunnies.” Richie grins.

Eddie can tell he’s gearing up to compare him to a cute little bunny so he hurries and interrupts him. “Why the fuck did you read _Of Mice and Men_?”

“We both read it,” Richie says, like it’s obvious. “In high school.”

“We had amnesia! Why do you remember high school?”

Richie’s voice turns saccharine and condescending. “Oh, but you were such a good little boy, Eddie, didn’t you do all of your homework every time?”

Eddie goes from zero to fireworks of rage. _“I don’t believe you can read!”_ he snarls, and when he reaches for one of Ben’s pillows only the fact that it’s made out of an unexpectedly heavy memory foam stops him from lobbing it in Richie’s direction. Eddie stops and stares at it, surprised.

Richie is laughing, either at the insult or at Eddie being visibly confused by a pillow.

“Come feel this,” Eddie says, prodding the pillows. He sits up and squishes the one behind him to see if it’s the same texture. He pushes the sham pillow out of the way for better access.

No. There is only one memory foam pillow, and for some reason it’s on Richie’s side of the bed.

Eddie grabs for it. “Never mind, it’s mine.”

“No fucking way,” Richie says. He doesn’t even know what he’s competing for, but he’s all in. He throws himself onto the bed with all of the grace of a belly flop. Eddie waits for the inevitable jostling, but the mattress only shifts the smallest bit as it absorbs the force of one entire Richie.

“Is it—?” Eddie breaks off from palpating the pillows to squish the bed under him. “Is it all memory foam?”

“Oh my god.” Richie is facedown in the mattress. “Okay, you hold the wine glass, I’ll jump on the bed.” But he makes no effort to move. He appears to be collapsing into the mattress, like it might absorb him like quicksand.

Eddie makes a fist and pushes it as deeply as he can into the mattress to feel its give. Is this a pillowtop? It feels like a pillowtop.

“Hey, I changed my mind, I’m not gonna Lenny you, just let me suffocate in this bed,” Richie says. He’s still muffled.

Eddie reaches for his phone, intending to text Ben to ask him for every possible detail about his bed, because this is the kind of bed Eddie has wanted all of his adult life with all of his adult money. Then he hesitates. If Richie mentions it later—and he almost certainly will, since he appears to be trying to die in this bed—Ben and the rest of the Losers might guess that Richie and Eddie shared. And Eddie is out, but Richie isn’t.

“So what we’re gonna do is,” Eddie says, grateful that Richie didn’t see his automatic lurch towards technology.

Richie makes a vague affirmative grunt.

“You’re going to lie on the mattress, and I’m going to push you out to sea.”

“Sounds good.”

“And then I’m going to shoot a flaming arrow at you. Just full-on Viking funeral.”

Richie makes a sound that is so overtly sexual that Eddie’s mouth snaps shut in shock, but Richie just groans, “God, it’s like you can read my mind.”

Eddie takes a moment to steady himself and then realizes he’s going to have to shift gears from watching Richie enjoy this bed. He cautiously lies down on his left side and realizes his mistake immediately: he’s facing the window, away from Richie. He rolls onto his back and braces himself to sit up on his elbow.

“Huh?” Richie is looking up now. His glasses sit crookedly on one ear. Eddie is immediately nervous for their structural integrity.

“Nothing,” Eddie says.

Richie braces his elbows underneath him and sits up. His posture is still bad, his shoulders rounded and his back slumping down. This mattress is too soft to provide him correct support if he lies on his stomach. He’ll get back pains. Eddie considers telling Richie that he’ll get back pains, and then he considers the way that Richie’s t-shirt pulls across his chest and changes his mind. After all, if Richie sleeps on his side with his arms around Eddie, he won’t get back pains.

“Do you toss and turn?” Richie asks. There’s already a tone of sympathy in his voice, like he’s prepared to commiserate. Eddie is strangely reminded of a bit from one of Richie’s standup routines that he watched at the gate at LaGuardia—one of the ones that went _you know how women are_ , followed by something blatantly offensive.

But Richie’s being sincere now. It’s disturbing to hear his tone and recognize it from words that, when Eddie heard them, he knew were not Richie’s own. Instinctively he knew that Richie did not write that—his childhood friend talked a lot of shit, but rarely was it truly hateful shit. Ignorant, sure. Provocation? Absolutely. But it never came from a place of malice like it did in the routine.

Except, if the tone matches—if Richie’s that good of an actor—how did Eddie know that it was something Richie didn’t mean? Was he just projecting? Did Eddie not _want_ to believe that Richie, _his Richie_ , would say such things?

But he did. He might not have written it, he might not think it, but he put it out into the world. Kids watched it.

Eddie feels sick, suddenly.

“No,” he says, turning to get his bottle of water off the nightstand. His fingers brush the long leaves of the spider plant. it’s sort of reassuring.

“I toss and turn.” As though in demonstration, Richie rolls onto his back, closer to Eddie but still upside-down on the bed. He rests his feet on the headboard. “Can’t turn my fucking brain off.”

Eddie takes a sip of water. Some of his tension relaxes. “Have you tried melatonin?” he asks, and then he hears himself.

The expression that Richie turns on him in response looks so sincerely disdainful of Eddie’s intelligence that Eddie bypasses outrage and bursts out laughing. He has to cap his water again or risk spilling it.

“Okay, okay, I’m sorry,” Eddie says. “Force of habit.”

Richie drops the face and his gaze flicks back toward the ceiling, turning almost dreamy. “Doesn’t do anything for me,” he explains. “Never has. I tried the extended release shit, doesn’t work either. Don’t think I didn’t see Big Bill flushing like sex different kinds of sleep meds down the toilet.”

Eddie stiffens. He hadn’t considered that Richie might have seen. “Why did you—why were you there?”

“Uh, ’cause all your shit was in my hotel room?” Richie says, like it’s obvious.

This time the implication that Eddie is stupid slips in through the cracks made earlier. Eddie bristles.

“Sorry, I don’t remember that, I was in a fucking medical coma,” he snaps back, and sets the bottle down harder than necessary on the nightstand. Apologetically he wipes some of the spider plant’s leaves out of the way. He doesn’t want to crush them.

Richie lifts his head, chin coming almost to his chest. “Sorry, did you want me to leave it in the crime scene?” he asks. “I had to fight the Derry Police for your shit, do you think I’d stop at Big Bill?”

Eddie barely understands this string of words. “What?”

Some of Richie’s sharpness relaxes. His head thumps back on the mattress again. “Didn’t realize you’d asked him to get rid of it,” he says. “I thought he was just—doing his Big Bill thing.”

“What Big Bill thing?”

Richie shrugs. “You know how he was.”

“Yeah, but I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Richie looks uncomfortable, staring up at the ceiling again. “‘Hey, kids, let’s go clown-hunting this summer.’ ‘Let’s go into the creepy haunted house.’ ‘Sorry about your arm, Eddie, but them’s the breaks!’”

Eddie stares at him, but Richie continues avoiding eye contact.

“That’s not what happened,” Eddie says quietly.

Richie lifts his eyes, but his eyes are soft and confused, not confrontational. “What?”

“That’s not what happened,” he repeats, enunciating this time. “Bill never bossed me around.”

Richie snorts. “Bill bossed all of us around.”

Before Eddie really knows what he’s doing, he’s kicking out of the blankets and standing, backing away from the bed to put some distance between himself and Richie. “Bill _never_ bossed me around. You think I don’t know when I’m being bossed around?”

Richie rolls onto one elbow. “Yeah, but every idea Bill had, it was like, okay, that’s what we’re doing now.”

Because Bill had the best ideas! Eddie opens his mouth to say that, and what comes out instead is, “Why are you so angry at Bill?”

Richie looks like Eddie stabbed him. Having been stabbed multiple times recently, Eddie’s pretty clear on the emotional response.

“I’m not mad at Bill, or Mike, or any of them,” Eddie goes on. “You were so rude to all of our friends in the hospital, and _don’t_ say it was on my behalf, or any of that bullshit. None of what happened was their fault.”

Richie lets out a disbelieving sort of laugh. “Oh, sure, you’d have gone to Neibolt by yourself if Big Bill hadn’t said it was a good idea?”

More baffled than he is angry, Eddie stares at him. “Yes,” he says, disbelieving.

He remembers the dirt under that porch, the bits of old mulch, the used needles, the empty cans, other pieces of garbage, the spiders. He sat cross-legged there, playing pretend. Playing that he was dying.

“Yes,” he says again, more quietly, looking at Richie and urging him to remember. It was hard enough to say it the first time. “I told you.”

Richie stares at him blankly for a long second, and then Eddie sees the click behind his eyes when the pieces connect.

“You said you were just walking by.”

Eddie takes a deep breath. The ache in his chest almost steels him, reminds him where his center is. Like the keel of the ship, breasting the waves.

“I used to go play under that porch,” he says.

Richie’s mouth opens a little in surprise. “You?” he asks. “Everyone knew—”

“Yeah, everyone knew,” Eddie interrupts.

That was part of the appeal. Everyone knew that homeless people sheltered there, had a drink, took their drugs, anything to get out of Derry any way they could. They tried to sleep out of the Maine winters. Later on, Eddie’s pretty sure that the police had to recover a couple of bodies from under the porch— _died of exposure_ , whatever the fuck that means, when it means that people don’t care enough about you to give you the things you need to live. For all Eddie knows, they were pulling corpses out from under that porch back in 1989, and Eddie was too naïve to understand.

“I did it anyway,” Eddie says, because it’s hard to say _I did it because of that_. “So if It had gotten me there, back then, would you have just written me off and gone back to your summer vacation?”

It seems like that’s all that Richie is doing right now. Blaming Bill for wanting to avenge Georgie, or hoping that Georgie wasn’t dead, or trying to find out the truth. When they were kids, they all knew that other kids were going missing, that they were growing up hunted, they were pursued and ensnared and picked off one by one, until they accepted it. But Bill didn’t—Bill’s human feeling was still intact, maybe the last in Derry. Georgie Denbrough was the wrong kid to pick, not because there would have been other kids that nobody gave a shit about, but because Bill brought the wrath of God with him when he chased Georgie.

And Eddie’s never going to fault Bill for that. For caring. Thank God that someone did.

“It’s not the same,” Richie says. “You weren’t my fucking brother, and we should all be grateful—”

“It’s exactly the same,” Eddie interrupts.

“It’s _not_ the same, and It _did_ get you,” Richie snaps.

Eddie rolls his eyes. “Okay, _that’s_ not the same, I’m a grown man and I made the choice to—”

“Not now,” Richie interrupts. _“Then.”_

Eddie remembers the broken arm, falling through the floor and then crawling off the shattered table, the clown advancing on him from the refrigerator and mocking him as he cried. And Richie holding his hand, and Bev wielding that slingshot with the silver slug, and—

“I saw you go down that hallway,” Richie says. “So I followed you. That’s how It split us up.”

Aside from the laughable disappointment that pain turned out to be, and the piss-yourself fear of the clown as the Teenage Werewolf prowling toward him, Eddie remembers little. Shock and fear will do that. He knows that he fell through the floor into the kitchen and onto the table, but he can’t remember where he was standing upstairs when he fell through—in the middle of the hallway? In a room?—or who was peering through the floor after him and saw him in danger.

It doesn’t sound like him, though. He might be braver than he ever thought he was, but bravery doesn’t always have to mean suicidal stupidity. At thirteen and the smallest out of all of his friends, including Bev, he’s pretty sure he would have made someone hold his hand while they went into the haunted house to hunt a monster. He almost asked for it again at forty. He cannot imagine going off on his own. Stanley was so miserable and terrified when they had to backtrack for him, pull It off of him, and staunch his bloody face.

“I don’t remember that,” he says.

He did fall through the floor of a house. He might have sustained a head injury. His mother certainly suggested as much later, when he threw her out of his hospital room and told her that she wasn’t going to stop his friends from visiting him anymore, but Eddie was clearly cognizant and out of patience, and it’s surprising how often medical staff will follow his lead when he knows what he’s talking about.

“Yeah, well, that’s because it wasn’t you,” Richie says. “I followed you into this other room, but it wasn’t you, it was It pretending to be you, and Bill went after me because he knew I was about to get myself fucking killed, and It stuck your head through a mattress and puked acid all over the floor, and then—that’s why It showed us the three doors, back down there. It was a little callback.” He rolls his eyes. “Fucking narrative amateur.”

Eddie frowns, trying to remember things outside of the chaos of mortal peril and medical shock that eclipses most of that encounter. “A mattress?”

“Yeah, like a dirty trash mattress,” Richie says. “Your severed head was moving under it, like a—big, big bed bug.” He smiles thinly, like it’s supposed to be a joke.

Eddie swallows. “I didn’t know it pretended to be me.”

Richie shrugs. “I mean, we all went after Beverly. We weren’t going to—no man left behind, and all that.”

He swallows again, but he knew that. One of the advantages is safety of numbers—and this is the statistical part of him, not the brave part—is that the weakest members of the group hide amongst the strongest. And Eddie, with his broken arm and his blubbering terror, was certainly not the fittest that day. Any of the Losers could have run and left him as a distraction to save their own lives, and they didn’t.

And Richie held his hand.

“You let Bill think you were going to leave him,” Eddie says.

Some of Richie’s anger has gone out like a candle. His shoulders are slumped now. He shrugs one, like it doesn’t mean anything.

“Yeah, but I let It think I was going to leave him too.” He’s gazing largely into the middle distance instead of at Eddie himself, but his mouth twitches into a little smile. It’s more self-satisfied than his bed bug joke earlier. “And It let me walk all the way over to the fucking baseball bat while I was weighing my options.” He looks at Eddie again and waggles his eyebrows.

Eddie—sort of loves him fort hat, actually. He loves Richie audacious, Richie smug about outsmarting the monster. He loves Richie when he stands empty-handed in front of an alien abomination and screams that It’s a sloppy bitch and challenges It to dance. Eddie can draw the line between the two incidents now, can see in hindsight that that was Richie trying to recapture the hold he had on It and on all of them. Sometimes, Richie is truly good at bluffing; and sometimes he has nothing.

They all try to go back to childhood. Results may vary.

“You can’t be mad at Bill if you’d have done the same thing.” Eddie has to make his point.

“I can and you can’t stop me,” Richie replies goodnaturedly. “And it’s still not the same thing.”

Eddie rolls his eyes but declines to continue the argument. He grew up thinking that his friends were his _real_ family, because they felt as close to it as anything he’d ever experienced, and if Richie went back for Eddie and for Bev and for Bill then he would have gone back for any one of them.

He sits down on the bed, secure in his own being right, and lets out a heavy sigh. His head is starting to spin a little, from overexertion and from the painkillers.

“Are you tired?” Richie asks.

He lets out another slow breath. “A little,” he admits. He should probably be lying down.

Richie scrunches up, twisting on the bed until he’s right side up, and then rolls onto his side facing Eddie. He digs in his pocket and produces his phone. “Wanna hear a song about ostriches fucking?” he asks.

“Why would I want that?” Eddie asks. “Why would anyone want that?”

But he fits himself into the curve of Richie’s body and lets Richie show him.

* * *

He wakes up multiple times during the night. One of them is because Richie is saying in his ear, “Okay, this is too hot, hang on,” and pulling away from him.

Eddie is too tired to protest and he’s almost falling back to sleep when Richie wraps his arms around him again. Eddie is under the blankets, and Richie is only half-under. He smells of fresh sweat.

“Good?” Eddie asks him, meaning _Are you settled?_

Richie’s nose fits into his hair again, breathing directly down onto the back of his neck. It should feel smothering, but instead it’s oddly comforting. Eddie finds himself wanting to match it as Richie’s barrel chest expands against his back.

“Uh-huh,” Richie murmurs, and Eddie leans back into him.

His stress dream of being at the dentist morphs into him and Richie fighting an assassin who, for some reason, has crept in through the open window and into the dental office. Eddie doesn’t go in much for dream analysis—as a man who married a woman very like his mother, he feels personally offended by Freud—but he supposes it should be reassuring that the assassin comes off much the worse.

The next time Richie wakes him up, the sky is threatening dawn.

“Eddie.”

“Hn.”

“I have to roll over.”

For a moment, Eddie, still stuck in the middle of a dream, thinks that a dog is talking to him and confiding a great personal problem, and then he blinks and processes the input from the rest of his body and sees the comforter on Ben’s bed and remembers where he is. The damp heat of Richie is still pressed up against his back, and there’s an apologetic tone to his voice.

Eddie would also very much like to roll over. Lying only on his left side is causing an ache in his hip, but since he recently had a tube installed in his right side, switching sides really isn’t an option right now.

“Well, I can’t,” he says.

It comes out sort of sulky. He _likes_ that Richie is wrapped around him. He doesn’t want Richie to roll over and hug a pillow—after they fought over who got to use the memory foam one—when Eddie’s lying right here in bed, perfectly available to his attentions.

“You don’t have to,” Richie says. He’s already untangling his arms from Eddie and the blankets. He rolls over. Eddie feels the line of his spine up against his back. The solid feeling of him is very good, satisfying, but it’s not the same.

Eddie huffs.

Richie starts to tremble a little bit, and Eddie’s sleepy brain takes a few seconds to process that Richie is laughing.

“Are you mad?”

“Yes,” Eddie says, but it comes out so petulant and nonthreatening that he immediately feels childish.

“Okay, hang on, don’t move.”

Eddie is in no danger of moving. His whole body is very heavy.

The transfer of force on the mattress is muffled by the pillowtop. Eddie suspects that this really is the kind of mattress they advertise using a glass of red wine and someone jumping up and down on it. But Eddie can feel the shift of Richie’s weight as he lifts himself up, plants an arm in front of Eddie, and then _rolls over him_ , barely touching him. Eddie feels the pressure shift across his legs instead of his torso, and then Richie lands heavy right in front of him. Eddie’s eyes pop open in surprise, and Richie is facing him. His eyes look soft and vulnerable without his glasses.

“Like this?” Richie asks.

He has morning breath. Eddie wrinkles his nose, but displeasure is somehow different from disgust.

Eddie scoots down a few inches on the bed—there’s plenty of room—and then leans his face directly into Richie’s chest.

“Okay, now if I hug you I’m definitely going to suffocate you to death,” Richie says. “You’re little and I have man boobs.”

Eddie’s too tired to unpack any of that right now. He rests his knee on Richie’s thigh and closes his eyes and feels as though he’s plunging headfirst into sleep.

“Brat,” Richie murmurs affectionately.

Eddie’s only barely awake, but he’s pretty sure that Richie doesn’t have the authority to label him a brat. He throws his weight sideways, just a little, and more or less shoulder checks Richie before he nods off again.

The next time he wakes up, it’s because his alarm is beeping.

“Shit,” he mutters, reaching out for it and colliding with something that, when he opens his eyes, turns out to be Richie’s face.

“What the fuck?” Richie asks, head snapped back and up like he just took an uppercut to the jaw. “The fuck?” His eyes are red and confused.

“Sorry!” Eddie says, sitting up too fast and hurting himself in the process. The _fucking marimba_ is still going. He reaches out for Richie’s chin and strokes it apologetically, little bits of stubble scraping over the pads of his fingers. “Sorry! Didn’t realize you were there.”

Richie blinks a few time and his sclerae fade to white. Eddie is starting to learn that the red eyes are a cue that Richie’s talking in his sleep. Then Richie rolls onto his back, shifts his weight, and reaches back to grab Eddie’s phone off the nightstand.

“Watch the—” Eddie says, reaching out as though there’s anything he can do to steady the spider plant from here.

Richie might be sleep-clumsy, but he doesn’t accidentally sweep the spider plant to the floor, either. His hand hovers over the phone, finger extended, and he stares at it for a long moment as though he’s forgotten what he’s doing before he taps the _off_ button. It reminds Eddie of nothing so much as an animated chicken from a Pixar movie. Then Richie relaxes, head thumping back onto the pillow. The non-memory pillow, since Richie lost that particular fight when Eddie played the “literally died” card.

“Sorry,” Eddie says. “I forgot to turn it off.”

Richie’s eyes slide closed again. Tentatively Eddie lowers his head back to Richie’s chest. He takes a deep breath. Richie’s maybe a little damp, but not in a gross way—his chest isn’t slick, and the texture of him is still hairy and rough and sort of appealing. His chest hair doesn’t grate Eddie’s cheek. There’s even a distinct difference in temperature where Eddie was asleep on Richie’s skin and shielded him from the open air.

He blinks across at Richie’s far shoulder, observing the roundness where it sits in the ball and socket joint, the small almost hairless spot at the well of the bone. Eddie’s sleep-heavy and incautious with Richie falling back to sleep under him again. He reaches up and tests the softness of his skin with his fingertip. The few hairs there are shorter, finer, and softer. Eddie has a bare spot in the dimple of his elbow that’s as soft as a baby’s skin. He wonders if Richie has a similar spot, and how weird it would be if he asked to look.

Richie startles awake and Eddie startles too, pulling back in alarm.

“Shit! Sorry!” Richie’s voice is very breathy. He blinks rapidly, eyelashes almost fluttering. “I forgot—your… low-speed car chase.” He’s clearly just clinging to consciousness.

Eddie stares at him, trying to make sense of the statement _I forgot your low-speed car chase_. “Are you awake?” he asks. He’s seen Richie sit up and scroll through Reddit in his sleep, which was utterly horrifying.

Richie’s eyes narrow, probably the best sign of cognizance that he could possibly give. “Your _run_ ,” he clarifies. “Are you getting up?”

“Oh,” Eddie says, putting Richie’s words into context and sort of seeing the logic there. He swallows. “I thought we were going grocery shopping later.”

Richie stares at him for long moments. Eddie wonders if he misunderstood—if they weren’t, in fact, going grocery shopping later and Eddie was mistaken somehow; if Richie forgot that they were going grocery shopping; or if Richie just failed to consider the ways that grocery shopping would be a workout for Eddie.

“Right,” he says. “Yes.”

“So, I figured we’d just…” Again, hesitantly, he lies back down on Richie’s chest, this time wondering if Richie will allow it now he’s made his intentions clear.

Richie gives a deep restful sigh. His free arm wraps around Eddie’s shoulders. “You’re so cute,” he mumbles.

Eddie, who is a grown man of forty years and technically on his third life, is not cute. He looks up to glare at Richie, whose eyes are blissfully closed again. When that fails to get a reaction, he reaches out and swats Richie’s other pec.

Richie yelps and jackknifes up. His bicep collides with the side of Eddie’s face and Eddie makes himself go limp and let the momentum carry him back onto the mattress, instead of fighting it. Only the sudden movement hurts his sore muscles; he didn’t land on anything important.

“Fuck, you wanna hit me in bed, you gotta wait until at _least_ the third date. At least,” Richie says, rubbing at his chest like Eddie actually did some damage. He focuses on where Eddie lies flat on the bed. “You okay?”

“I’m not cute,” Eddie says with the last of his air, and then breathes slowly through the discomfort. He’s really fine, his body’s just surprised.

“You’re a little bastard, is what you are,” Richie says, not without affection. “Are you kicking me out of bed?”

“No.”

“Then stop hitting me and go back to sleep.”

“Show me your elbow,” says Eddie, little bastard that he apparently is.

Richie responds to this with the appropriate level of confusion, brows furrowing and mouth flattening out.

“Just show me.”

Richie puts his hand on his own shoulder. The muscles in his arm bunch up very attractively, distracting Eddie from his mission for a moment. Richie has a few scars there, and a freckle that sits almost in the dimple. Eddie reaches out and touches it, oddly pleased, and then follows the line to the soft spot. The tip of his index finger fits almost perfectly in the dimple there, beside the bone.

Absurdly satisfied by this investigation, Eddie says, “Thank you. You can put your arm down.”

Richie’s sleepy expression takes on a sort of smirk. Having decided that Richie makes a dangerous pillow—maybe through a little of Eddie’s own fault—Eddie pushes on his far shoulder to urge him to lie flat, then climbs more fully on top of him. His chest rests almost on Richie’s stomach. His feet are in danger of hanging off the end of the bed.

“Is this okay?” he asks.

“Mm-hmm,” Richie says, closing his eyes and tilting his head back. “I’m gonna snore like this, just so you know.”

“You snore anyway.”

“I do not.”

“You definitely do,” Eddie says. He’s aware that he should find it grating, but honestly it helps soothe his constant low-grade anxiety to know that Richie is breathing fine. “You should get a mouthguard.”

“You should get a muzzle,” Richie murmurs back.

Eddie sort of wants to ask him how he slept, though he figures that if he keeps Richie awake now it will diminish Richie’s overall experience. Is it normal for Richie to wake up a lot during the night, with all of his tossing and turning? Eddie felt none of it, except for the moments that required a direct response from him. Maybe Richie has disordered sleeping and that’s why he doesn’t sleep deeply, and why he sometimes talks. Maybe the line for him between waking and sleeping is just very thin. Does Richie really mind the waking up, since they don’t have anywhere to be today?

Back in New York, Eddie hated waking up in the middle of the night. Part of it was an issue of age—having to wake up to urinate, though usually he managed to head that off by peeing before bed as part of his nighttime routine—and part of it was an issue of health. He consulted many sleep specialists about ways to fall asleep and stay asleep. He was religious about his eight hours, because he knew that he had to be up at a certain hour and the idea of being fatigued during the work day was the worst possible thing he could think of that was also mostly in his control. He resented those moments where Myra kept him up late, or woke him up in the middle of the night.

And, he thinks, in the traitorous little voice that whispers things that make him feel like a bad son and a bad husband, he didn’t really want to be awake with Myra. Waking up and knowing that Richie’s here with him is different. Maybe Richie isn’t comfortable, but all that he has to do to get comfortable is roll over. Richie doesn’t actually want to let go of him. He doesn’t mind that Eddie doesn’t want to let go either.

The inside of Eddie’s right elbow is sort of folded around Richie’s side, tender vulnerable skin against tender vulnerable skin. Something settles over Eddie, too quiet to be the profound sunny happiness he expects from rom-coms where couples wake up in bed together. They’re having a lazy morning in bed and sleeping late. This is what a lazy morning in bed is supposed to feel like. He’s _content_.

* * *

It turns out that, as weird as shopping with Richie at a department store is, he’s absolutely perfect for Eddie’s new mission to be hedonistic and self-indulgent in a grocery store. Eddie steers the cart, letting himself lean forward and take a rest when they stop to consider the merits of various products. Richie continues to be the shopping partner version of an affectionate cat bringing half-eaten mice back to its human family for praise and pats.

At the moment, he’s holding up two containers of precut fruit salad. It’s more expensive than the entire uncut fruits sitting right next to the display. Back in New York, Eddie would have scoffed at the premade mixtures, considering them a racket, an issue of laziness, just one more way for the grocery store to squeeze money out of customers. He would have prided himself on taking home the fruit and cutting it up himself.

Now, with his numb right hand, he can’t trust himself to wield a knife. He’s too clumsy, and he doesn’t know if he can apply the necessary amount of force.

“Get the one with the mango, it’s about to go out of season,” Eddie says. He frowns at the cantaloupe and says, “That doesn’t look as good.”

Richie sets the winner back in the cart with a half-sung, _“Fruit salad!”_ As he returns the other one to the display, he asks, “When is mango season?”

“End of spring through early autumn,” Eddie replies. “You know summer’s coming when mangos are in the store.”

Richie looks incredulous. “Really?”

It occurs to Eddie that Richie lives in California, notorious for its strict rules about agriculture and altogether a much better climate for summer fruits. Maybe Richie has access to mango whenever he wants it—not that Eddie doesn’t have access to mango, this is the twenty-first century and he can afford to shop at nicer grocery stores—but access to _good_ mango.

“One in four people are allergic to mango skin,” Eddie says.

Richie stares at him. “You can eat mango skin?”

“Three out of four people can. One in four has a reaction like poison ivy on the inside of their throat.”

They stare at each other for a long moment. Eddie can tell from the slightly horrified look in Richie’s eyes that he’s imagining, viscerally, what that would feel like. Richie frequently had bouts of poison ivy when they were kids; at one point Eddie actually associated the smell of calamine lotion with him.

“So counting Patty,” Richie says, “there are eight of us.”

“Mango roulette,” Eddie intones solemnly. “Peaches are about to go out of season, too.”

“Do you want peaches?”

“No, I don’t like that they’re fuzzy.”

“You’re such a baby.”

“Get some nectarines.”

“Why don’t I just shave the peaches for you? They’re basically the same thing.”

“They are _not_ the same thing.”

Richie doesn’t even make any dirty jokes about the shapes of stone fruits, and he doesn’t hold any up to his chest in transparent references to breasts, but he does raise his eyebrows and put on a strange face as he carefully selects three nectarines and drops them into a plastic bag. Eddie leans on the cart and takes deep breaths, trying to keep his weight off of his feet so that he can increase his endurance. It turns out that Richie handling fruit is a joke in itself—the constant _threat_ that he might say something inappropriate seems just as entertaining to Richie as actually saying it. Eddie obliges by giving him suspicious looks, which increases the width of his smile as they move through the store.

Eddie is contemplating organic versus regular Hass avocados when Richie appears behind him.

“Do you need this?”

It’s a twelve-pack of Capri Sun juice pouches.

“Do you know how much sugar is in those?” Eddie asks.

“Nope!” Richie says brightly.

Eddie considers, remembers that he’s actually trying to enjoy himself, and imagines drinking from a juice pouch on the couch while he watches TV with Richie and then takes a nap in the sun.

Richie slides the case of juice under the cart.

Shopping without a grocery list is weird. There _is_ a grocery list on Richie’s phone, but instead of strict guideline it’s a polite suggestion. Eddie’s not used to lists being polite suggestions. Instead, he’s going to walk up and down every aisle and consider every product, with an eye for things he’d like to snack on while he’s meant to be packing on protein and calories. He still likes to eat fruit in the mornings—there’s something very satisfying about breaking his fast with fruit and ice water when he comes in so hot and tired—and he likes the food that Richie makes, so they’re going to stock up on bacon, potatoes, cheese, and pancake mix. Maybe frozen waffles. Definitely Zebra Cakes. Ever since they talked about it, Eddie has been thinking about Zebra Cakes.

“We don’t actually know when they’re coming back from Location Redacted,” Eddie points out, nervous, as they move toward the bakery.

If he and Richie are only going to be here for the rest of the week, they probably shouldn’t go too crazy with the perishable goods. They have a limited number of meals, and while Eddie doesn’t mind the idea of bringing fruit with them to Bangor, he’s not interested in buying a cooler to transport lunchmeat. If Ben and Bev will come back to Ben’s house soon and someone is there to eat things, he won’t have to worry about it. But Ben and Bev were vague about their plans.

“They sell individual cake slices,” Richie says. He seems to teleport to the display in question.

Eddie looks down into the little selection of cake slices. Is Eddie being tempted? He’s definitely being tempted. In the words of one of the ridiculous YouTube videos Richie made him watch last night, this is how the devil buys souls.

Richie twists the knife. “They have cheesecake.”

Eddie will definitely eat the cheesecake before they have to return to Bangor. That’s not even in question. There is no danger of him wasting cheesecake.

“Do they have one with raspberry?”

“Raspberry swirl with a dark chocolate crust.”

That settles it. “Put it in the cart.”

There are also many tempting containers of bakery-made cookies, full sheet cakes, pies, Danishes, strudel bites, and other confections. Eddie is overwhelmed by choice. None of these are things that he could have justified in his past life. He’s dimly aware that sugar is addictive and gluten is bad for him—it can aggravate inflamation, and some people find it so hard on their systems that it impedes their long-term ability to derive nutrients from food at all and they starve to death—

And no medical doctor has actually suggested that that might be the case for Eddie.

“Do you want English muffins?” Richie asks, squinting down at a long tray. “I can try to do the thing Maggie makes, but we might be better off just asking her.”

The idea of Richie’s parents cooking for him still makes Eddie uncomfortable. It’s easier with Richie. He doesn’t _expect_ Richie to wait on him, but when Richie is cooking for both of them, it feels less demanding to eat half of whatever Richie makes. They’re not too adventurous about it either, so it feels like less of an imposition. Eddie has spent much of his time eating only to live, frequently strategizing to avoid having to think about food at all.

“What goes on the English muffins?”

“Medium ham slices,” Richie replies immediately.

Eddie blinks at him, unimpressed.

Richie holds up both hands to mime stacking things. “Muffin, pepper jelly—”

“Pepper jelly,” Eddie repeats, because that’s something he wanted to get while they were here and he doesn’t know if it made it onto Richie’s grocery list.

Richie nods confirmation but continues his recipe. “—ham, egg, avocado, muffin.” He mimes closing the sandwich and then taking a bite out of his own hands.

“Don’t put your hands in your mouth, you don’t know where anything in this store has been,” Eddie says. He just watched Richie handle unwashed fruit.

“I mean, if we’re getting pepper jelly, we might as well,” Richie says, and sets the English muffins in the cart. “Yeah?”

It takes Eddie a moment to realize that Richie is asking for his confirmation. If Eddie says, _No, I don’t want them_ , Richie will put them back. Richie is not expressing a unilateral decision here. The power gives him something of a headrush. He nods his acceptance of English muffins.

Eddie’s grocery expenses tend to be mild. Cooking for recipes is expensive, Myra tells him, which is maybe why his mother didn’t do much of that when he was a kid. Lots of things go into one meal—not that any of the recipes Myra makes are very complex, because she cooked very healthy, basic protein and a vegetable and _sometimes_ if they could justify it, a healthful starch. _Healthful_. Not healthy, but as though health were something that could be quantified and then instilled in a root. And then there were substitutions for the things that Eddie believed he was allergic to—dairy-free butter, egg substitute, egg-free egg noodles, the works.

“I want peanut butter,” Eddie says in the relevant aisle.

Richie puts the peanut butter in the cart.

Eddie pauses and then adds, “And cashew butter.” It’s non-perishable, right? There are people who survived on jars of peanut butter. Eddie can hardly waste peanut butter.

A spark appears in Richie’s eyes, a conspiratorial _we’re getting away with it_ sort of look that Eddie remembers from childhood. He sets the cashew butter in the cart. Then his hand hovers over the almond butter. He raises his eyebrows at Eddie.

“Yes,” Eddie says.

Richie puts the almond butter in the cart. “Do you want extra crunchy, too?”

Eddie almost seizes on the opportunity to consume yet more nuts—they’re protein! He’s allowed! He is not allergic!—and then remembers his broken tooth. “Not yet,” he says.

“Wuss,” Richie says, so of course Eddie immediately throws the extra-crunchy peanut butter into the cart with the others.

In the snack foods aisle, Eddie goes a little crazy. He sets the Zebra cakes in the cart himself, and when he looks up at him, Richie is staring at him wide-eyed.

“What?” he demands.

Richie pretends to come out of a daze. “Sorry. It’s just—did you get so much cooler in the last ten seconds?”

“Oh, fuck off,” Eddie replies. His face tingles a little bit, threatening to flush. He turns away from Richie and starts choosing Hostess and Little Debbie boxes.

“No, really, Eddie, it’s just like all of a sudden you’re so cool.” Richie fans himself, staring at Eddie with big eyes, knees relaxed like they’ve gone weak.

This is how Eddie discovers that Richie playing like he’s deeply infatuated with him does something for him. His stomach flutters and his ribs constrict and all of a sudden it feels a little harder to breathe, but not in a bad way. This is what having a crush feels like. Eddie has a crush. Everyone else got this experience decades ago, but Eddie gets to feel it now.

“Shut up and get some of the Hostess fruit pies, I love those things, they’re fucking gross,” Eddie orders him.

“It bodes well for me that you love gross things,” Richie says, and retrieves the fruit pies.

Eddie takes deep breaths as they continue through the store, feeling the pleasant ache in his ribs recede and then looking covertly at Richie to make it happen again. Somewhere around the fourth time he sneaks a look, Richie turns his head at the same time and widens his eyes comically and leans in close. It’s so pointed that Eddie realizes without Richie having to say anything that he’s been aware of it this whole time, and Eddie almost falls into the display of chips laughing. When he straightens up, bracing himself on the cart, Richie is standing tall and pretending like nothing’s happening.

The other people in the grocery store must think they’re insane. Eddie doesn’t care; Richie’s the only one he’s ever going to see again.

Somewhere around the _novelties_ aisle—a euphemism for ice cream and ice-cream related products, including cakes—Eddie’s pulse starts to pick up in an unpleasant way. He takes a deep breath, trying to work out where the pain is and what’s happening before he realizes that the stress of the full cart is finally matching the fun of hanging out with Richie. It’s not that he can’t afford it—he can afford it, and Richie can afford it, and if they leave all of their nonperishables at Ben’s house Ben might even try to reimburse them for it, knowing Ben. Money is not the issue.

It’s that he looks at the full cart and remembers, vaguely, his mother strictly rationing out her spousal benefits from his father’s life insurance to buy their groceries. She did the math in her head and told him to keep his hands on the cart so that he didn’t get lost, as though Eddie, at ten years old, was in danger of getting lost in the same grocery store they’d been frequenting his entire life. _Put that back, it’s too much_ , she said, which turned into _put that back, it’s not good for you_ , and then she’d hand him something that she’d picked for him herself. Something tasteless.

This full cart is too much. Four kinds of peanut butter is too much. Sprite _and_ Capri Sun is too much. The big bags of frozen restaurant meals are really just microwave dinners made fancy, and Eddie ate so many microwave dinners as a kid, despite them definitely not being good for him.

Richie reminds him, “Okay, the doc signed off on ice cream, what do you want?”

Eddie stares at the pints of Ben and Jerry’s and Haagen-Dazs and the quarts of Breyer’s and the gallons of family-size Neapolitan and realizes that he feels like his brain is sweating. He even tucks his chin to his chest instinctively, checking for the neck stiffness that might indicate meningitis. His neck doesn’t hurt, so it’s probably just anxiety.

“I need a minute,” he says, and crouches behind the cart, extending his arms in increments so that he doesn’t hurt himself.

Richie continues looking at the display. “Did you like the cherry vanilla?” he asks.

Eddie liked the cherry vanilla, the bright chunks of artificial red cherry in the pink ice cream. There was something cheerful about it. “Yeah,” he pants.

Richie glances down at him, seems to realize that Eddie is having some kind of emotional meltdown in the ice cream aisle, and says, “You had the Tonight Dough? I like the Tonight Dough,” and pulls a pint out of the freezer. Instead of putting it in the cart, he holds it to the back of Eddie’s neck.

It feels pretty good, actually.

He steadies himself and then stands up. “Okay,” he says, trying to pretend that didn’t just happen. “I don’t think I can eat a whole pint—can we get a bunch of those little sample dudes?” They look like they’re meant to be consumed in one sitting, and it’ll be less intimidating for him to have one of those after dinner.

“You’re speaking my language,” Richie says, throwing his Tonight Dough in the cart and then grabbing the small containers of Haagen-Dazs by the handful.

Eddie squints at the display and then says in delight, “Oooh, it’s buy three, get the fourth free.”

Richie tilts his head as he stares into the cart, visibly counting. Then he grabs two more of the small containers in one hand and drops them into the cart with a flourish. Eddie is reminded of nothing so much as Santa Claus dropping presents down the chimney.

“Should I pay?” Richie says, turning back towards the selection of ice cream. “Because I can, like, spit or swallow the cost, no problem.”

Eddie stares at him for a long moment, trying to figure out if that euphemism has made it into the mainstream. Apparently he takes too long to respond, because Richie turns his head in confusion and Eddie gets to watch in real time as Richie runs back the tapes and realizes what he just said. His shoulders creep up toward his ears and his expression flattens out in apparent embarrassment.

“I meant,” Richie starts, and then he just sighs, shoulders slumping. He looks deeply disappointed in himself. “I was thinking about blowjobs.”

Eddie snorts so hard that his front incision gives him a warning about his structural integrity. “If you wanted popsicles, you can just go buy them.”

Richie’s expression somehow looks both aggrieved and deeply guilty at the same time, and he shakes his head. “Yeah, I can’t handle you eating popsicles right now. If you want a popsicle, I’m gonna have to leave the room. Anyway, who’s paying? Are we going Dutch? I don’t care either way.”

Eddie, blushing at the idea, does not buy popsicles. But this does mean that he thinks about sex the entire time they’re paying for their groceries, which is not a problem that he’s ever had before.

* * *

The car is very full, when they get all of their bags into it. They have to put some of the groceries in the backseat. Eddie—accustomed first to his mother’s strict budget and then to driving an Escalade—can’t remember ever seeing a car so full of food. Some ancient part of his brain rejoices in the bounty. A much more modern part of his brain is still stuck on _What have I done?_

He falls asleep in the car on the ride home, partially because of the Dramamine he took earlier and partially because of the exertion of walking leisurely through a grocery store. As the car slows and turns up the laneway toward Ben’s property he wakes up, and only then does his groggy brain alert him that they’ve failed a spot check.

Richie, it seems, doesn’t come to the same conclusion until he’s staring up at the stairs. The very elaborate stairs up Ben’s multi-level porch, and the additional flight up to the front door, behind which there’s a landing and yet more stairs.

And they’re going to have to make several trips.

“Ah,” Richie says. “Well. Shit.”

Eddie snorts. It’s one thing to for Richie to offer him buffalo-sauce flavored pretzel bites, it’s another for Richie to realize that they’re going to have to carry all their ridiculous purchases up the stairs, across Ben’s house, and into the kitchen. How heavy are expensive nut butters? If Ben doesn’t want them or won’t eat them, food banks really like expensive nut butters, right?

“You can go up and lie down if you want,” Richie says as he cuts the engine and unbuckles. He slouches forward and seems to lurch out of the car more than stand up out of it. Watching Richie collapse himself into a Subaru is its own form of entertainment. Eddie has an absurd mental image of Richie trying to fit in a Volkswagen Beetle.

_Clown car_ , says a voice in his head that, far from sounding like Richie or Eddie himself, instead has the distinct cadence of Stan. _Don’t even bother_.

Eddie is immediately put out at himself for ruining the joke.

“I can carry groceries,” he says, too tired to be properly indignant just yet.

Richie slams the driver’s side door and doubles back around to the backseat before he answers. Poking his head in, he says, “You’re one of the assholes who would dislocate your own shoulder carrying in cases of soda.”

“I have never dislocated a shoulder,” Eddie says, and then stops to consider whether that’s actually true.

He mostly skimmed the summary of his injuries in his discharge papers because seeing them all spelled out like that in black and white made him feel a little woozy, and clearly Sovereign Light Hospital is not forthcoming with saying things like _you died_ in plain English. He’s pretty sure that he took most of his force at center mass. Any pain he has related to lifting his arms is mostly localized to his ribcage, but that whole part of his skeleton is sort of a black hole—Eddie doesn’t want to look at it and he strongly suspects it doesn’t want him to look at it either.

“Yeah, but you would,” Richie replies with absolute certainty, and then starts throwing bags at Eddie. “You get chips and bread.”

Eddie grinds his teeth, but considering that he blacked out on these very stairs yesterday, he concedes that restricting himself to lightweight items is probably a good idea. And he should make as few trips as possible.

Then he considers the situation with greater awareness and realizes something interesting. He carries his chips and bread up to the porch and waits at the halfway point, taking a seat at the chess table and making himself comfortable so that he can watch Richie move heavy objects up and down a flight of stairs. Richie doesn’t catch on until he’s making his way up on the second trip, at which point he stops and looks at Eddie with some concern.

“You okay?”

“Fine,” Eddie replies lightly. Part of him is thinking about ripping into the chips so that he can feel like he’s eating popcorn while he watches the show.

Richie slowly connects the dots in his head. It takes him a while. He’s back down at the car when he suddenly looks up at Eddie again, finds Eddie watching him, and snorts loudly in amusement. He brings up the cases of Sprite and Capri Sun, stops on the porch, breaks into the soda, and deposits a green aluminum can on the chess table in front of Eddie. Then he continues hauling the drinks up to the house.

“If you spill those,” Eddie starts.

“I’m not gonna spill them,” Richie says, and on his next step the cardboard tears and he has to catch the box on the step.

Technically, he doesn’t spill them—none of the cans fall out of the box. Eddie watches nervously as he continues up the steps. Only when he has left the Sprite securely on the landing and is making his way back down to the car—with a triumphant little look at Eddie—does Eddie remember to thank him for the soda.

Eddie helps put the groceries away. He might not be up to hauling things up and down stairs—and that’s another shortcoming of Ben’s architectural marvel: not only does it have an elaborate porch with tall stairs, it’s a split level, so inside are _yet more stairs_ —but he’s perfectly capable of removing objects from plastic bags. He can even do it while seated at the island.

Richie is also surprisingly good at freezer Tetris, which Eddie finds impressive. Then he has some questions for himself about what he does and does not find attractive in a man and why.

“If the air doesn’t circulate to the back of the freezer, you’ll get condensation in the fridge,” he warns him.

Richie eclipses what he’s doing by virtual of being tall and broad. “That’s not a thing.”

“It is so a thing, and if you get condensation in the fridge, you’ll get water on the floor.”

“That’s not how the water cycle goes, Eds.”

“And Ben has _hardwood floors_ , so if there’s water—”

“I’ll show you some hard wood,” Richie says, and then steps aside to display a packed but very organized freezer.

Eddie actually falls silent, considering the brightly-colored boxes and logically-placed bags. Everything is grouped into little categories based on size.

“That’s right.” Richie lets the door swing shut. “I’m a forty-year-old man who mostly eats frozen food and takeout, we’re in my house now.”

They are very much still in Ben’s house.

“I am impressed by your skill at living just below functional adult levels,” Eddie replies seriously.

There’s something faintly absurd about Richie’s smile as he turns away to start stocking the fridge. It seems too big and faintly wolfish, showing too many teeth, but it’s also clearly not for Eddie, because Richie hides it a moment later. Eddie folds his fingers against his palms and rests his chin in his hands so that he can watch him.

He takes a nap and when he wakes up Richie makes one of the frozen P. F. Chang’s meals for dinner (“Knock knock!” “Who’s there?” “Water chestnuts, open up, motherfucker!”). They watch cooking shows and Eddie sits with his feet resting on Richie’s lap, arguing the merits of _Masterchef_ versus _Masterchef Junior_. Then he eats a small container of dulce de leche-flavored Haagen-Dazs and wonders if he has a new favorite ice cream flavor.

He nods off again and when he wakes up it’s almost eleven. Richie hasn’t moved, but as soon as he sees that Eddie is awake again he says, “Thank god, I really have to pee,” and hooks both hands under Eddie’s ankles to lift his legs off him and free himself. He goes down the hallway, presumably to the bathroom. Eddie gets up to take his nighttime dose of painkillers and goes to get ready for bed.

It’s easier, this time.

* * *

He wakes up in the middle of the night. He’s in a dark room and Richie is wrapped warm around him. Eddie’s throat is parched and his heart is racing and there’s a strange tight ache in his gut that speaks of threatening nausea, and when he breathes carefully he can feel a limn of sweat between himself and his pajamas. He lies there for a bit, thinking about how hot Richie is and whether that’s making it worse, and whether he’s going to get sick the way he was that night at the Toziers’ house. Eventually he decides that, if that’s the case, it’s better to move clear of the big man hugging him.

When he leans away from Richie’s embracing arm, Richie wakes up, then grunts and rolls away to give him space. Eddie takes little sips of water in a way that would make his nurses proud, looking down at the dim shape of Richie against the bedding. He feels oddly charmed. It’s not sexy, but it’s cute, like sharing a bed with some large warm snuffly animal. He lies down again, back to back with Richie, and waits to see if the water helps.

The nausea doesn’t go away. In fact, a wave of physical weakness washes over him, making his knees rubbery despite the fact that he’s lying down. He starts to shiver and gives up, resigning himself to being sick, and gets up to go to the bathroom. He hopes that this is just a side effect of the medication.

One advantage of the master suite is that the bathroom is closer. He kneels and dry heaves twice into the toilet, coughing, but nothing comes up. He drinks more water, blows his nose, and then feels so weak and shaky that he has to lie down on the bathmat. While he’s there, staring at the tile, he finds a stray red hair curled in a corner.

It is better to be ill but knowing that he has friends than to be back in New York City without any idea that they exist.

“Eddie?” Richie asks. He sleeps heavily, but it doesn’t surprise Eddie that the coughing woke him up.

“I’m okay,” Eddie replies.

“Okay.”

Only when his feet ache with cold does Eddie realize that he nodded off on the bathroom floor. He makes himself get up. Trying to conserve body heat, he hugs himself at the elbows and shivers his way back to the bed.

Richie has moved closer to the center of the bed, but when Eddie climbs back under the covers he wakes up again and scoots over to make room for him. Eddie pulls the blankets up to his neck and leans back into. He tucks his ice cube toes along Richie’s calves. Richie gasps a little.

“I’m cold,” Eddie complains.

The roll of Richie’s body makes Eddie think that he’s going to lie on top of him, but at the last second Richie seems to catch himself and instead presses up against him. He pulls him in to spoon instead of crushing him. His hand spands from Eddie’s navel to the bottom of his ribcage.

“Hurts?” Richie asks.

“No,” Eddie says truthfully.

“Hmm.”

Richie kisses the back of his neck. The skin there goes hot and tingles. Eddie makes himself breathe steadily as Richie falls asleep again.

He sleeps more. It’s easy with the rhythm of Richie’s slight snores—which should be too loud or annoying, but instead fade into white noise as Eddie accustoms himself to them. They’re easy to match, and Richie’s pulse is slow and steady and reassuring, and though Eddie no longer feels nauseated, he’s definitely tired. His body is trying to piece itself back together and it can’t waste energy on keeping him conscious.

He wakes up again with his heart in his throat, not because he’s sick again, but because something woke up. For a moment he thinks, panicked, of waking up convinced that there was an intruder in the house, a dazed _I knew it!_ rolling through his mind, but that’s not it. He tries to find a culprit. Was it something he heard?

Then Richie shifts against him in his sleep, pulling Eddie a little bit closer, and Eddie draws in a silent gasp.

Richie’s hard. And grinding on him in his sleep. It’s a gentle movement—an arched line from ankles to hips that then relaxes. The sleepy huff of Richie’s breath ghosts hot over Eddie’s cheek, and then Richie mumbles quietly as he relaxes and settles again. The pressure of his dick is distinct from the rest of his pelvis where it pushes into the fat part of Eddie’s right buttcheek.

Well, Eddie’s not cold anymore. He’s hot—between the humidity of them lying under the covers together, the budding sweat where their bodies warm each other, the faint tickle of Richie’s hair, the hum of Richie’s snoring behind his head—Eddie doesn’t know what to think. He sort of wishes that Richie would do it again. No matter what Richie’s dreaming about, the idea is interesting. He doesn’t know what goes on in Richie’s head, but there’s something fascinating about them lying here in the dark together, and Richie’s body knowing that Eddie’s body is here, and…

_Practicing,_ Eddie thinks. He understands the mechanics of morning wood, that the pressure of a full bladder on the prostate gland isn’t sexual, that Richie’s dick probably isn’t particular about whose ass it’s rubbing up against, but… Richie’s not doing it on purpose. He just feels good right now, unconsciously; he’s lying here, clinging to Eddie in his sleep, and he feels good, Eddie feels good to him, and that fills Eddie with a ridiculous and tingling sort of pride.

He’s not doing it on purpose either, but Eddie can feel himself getting hard in response. His toes spread out on the sheets and dig in for more sensation; his breathing comes a little shallower. he waits, wide awake, for Richie to move again. If he does, Eddie tells himself, he will wake Richie up and roll over, because it’s not fair to take advantage of Richie in his sleep like that. He’ll… fold up against Richie’s back instead and line his hips up with Richie’s ass and wrap his arm around his big barrel chest and—

And maybe never get back to sleep again.

He doesn’t know how long he lies there with his brain humming like a circuit. He might go in and out of sleep. He’s not sure. Some of what he imagines is so clear that it plays out like a film behind his eyelids, like lucid dreaming blending reality and the subconscious, and only when he realizes what he’s seeing does he understand that he’s dreaming and it’s not real: Richie waking and turning his head and kissing his neck; pulling the collar of his pajama shirt aside so that he can mouth at his shoulder, his collarbone; draping his arm over Eddie and rolling him forward into the mattress and holding him there with his body weight and pinning hands and biting at his ear.

Only when his toes curl does Eddie realize that he has twisted onto his belly so he can grind a little into the mattress. The pressure makes his breath catch and he holds it so that he doesn’t make a sound, tilting his hips back like a decent bedmate instead of someone who fucks a mattress while someone else sleeps on it.

Fuck.

He’s not going to be able to get back to sleep, that’s for sure. Eddie has some experience with the way his thoughts spiral and the way his brain sinks teeth into them, especially at night when there’s nothing else for him to focus on. And this is too appealing and Richie is lying hot right behind him, no longer rubbing against him but apparently sleeping unbothered by whatever dreams he might be having, untroubled by what he has unknowingly caused.

Time is elastic in these wee hours before dawn. Eddie’s been burning hot for a while, and it’s not like teasing himself is going to help the situation.

With a sigh of frustration, he rolls out of Richie’s arms again and gets out of bed. He walks slowly and calmly to the bathroom and closes the door behind him. With the autopilot of early morning lethargy, he walks over to the shower.

_Good idea, cold shower, proper treatment,_ his brain supplies, even as he turns the dial further into the red. His brain has nothing to say about that—nothing at all, in fact, a stunning absence of thought astonished by his own daring. He unbuttons his pajamas without hesitation and folds them on the countertop for safekeeping. He pulls a clean towel out of the linen closet—it doesn’t do to be caught unawares—and leaves it hanging on the rack, readily available for when he gets out. Then he opens his eyes again and steps into the shower.

The hot water is immediately so good. His incisions are sensitive to it, but it doesn’t feel like _pain_ , just heat. And that’s insignificant compared to the relief with which his head tilts back and his shoulders relax, as the hot water flows down over him. The warmth draws the blood to the surface of his skin. He feels like he might be glowing.

Really, he just wants to feel good. He wants a return on his fucking investment. He poured a lifetime of care and attention into his body and what he wants back is for the experience to be worth the effort. That’s what it boils down to: he wants to feel like everyone else claims to, he wants to feel good, he thinks that he’s earned it after dying. Twice.

And right now he doesn’t feel _bad_. The absence of pain can sometimes be enough, but it’s not right now. The sear of heat along his incisions doesn’t feel like something is wrong, but instead like a new and more intense way of being, a reminder that he is alive, he is here, in this moment, in this shower. Carefully he lifts his left arm toward the showerhead and lets the water pour down from his elbow to his bicep, his armpit, his side. Every part of himself is awake and alive, right down to his toes, which seem to throb painlessly in the water pooling on the tile. He takes up every inch of his skin, his blood surging at the perimeter of his body, steam in his nose and throat and lungs.

_Here I am_ , his body says. Far from the cold and the dark and the fearful. Clean and safe and comfortable and straining, really, to be more than he is. _Here we are_.

Maybe this is all that it means to feel good. Not feeling bad is a start, at least, and the water washes away any sweat that beads up on his skin, and if he doesn’t think about it he can just feel. He can just be here with his body and not try to justify anything to his mind. He is becoming a creature of id, of hunger and comfort and desire.

He runs careful hands down his chest, along either side of his front incision. His body is somewhat alarming now. He’s careful with the border of his bruises and the sudden drop on one side where bone is missing from his ribcage. He can be more confident when his hands slide over his stomach, less sensitive; but his body is unfamiliar there too. He’s too thin—his body ate its fat stores and he’s trying to build them back up, breakfast by breakfast, snack by snack. He used to work out as a preventative measure, but he’s never had clearly defined abdominal muscles before. He’s given to understand that it’s almost impossible for people who are healthy and well-hydrated to have them all the time, and so he never pursued musculature when he tried to shape himself into something _healthy_ , something _safe_. He’s just underweight. He runs a thumb under his navel and makes himself consciously relax, makes the pouch of his belly push into his palm.

Some people call this style of dance—running the hands over the body, calling attention and eyes to it—“self-love.” Eddie has the vague idea that it’s meant to be titillating. He doesn’t feel titillated by it, and he doesn’t really want people to look at him. His body is not beautiful, but he’s here by himself with his eyes closed, so he doesn’t need it to be right now. He just needs it to be able to feel hot water, and it is, and his nipples are tightening in something like anticipation. He deliberately contracts his abdominal muscles just to feel the difference, navel drawing in towards his spine, and his dick bobs hopefully where it waits for its turn, persistent and insistent in equal measure.

Honestly his first response is amusement that it’s finally making a decent showing after a stimulus that makes sense. He doesn’t know what the fuck the nightmare was the other night, only that he woke up hard and uncannily aroused. This doesn’t feel threatening, even a little bit. Instead it feels like a rabbit hole that Eddie could get lost in—the sensation of Richie up against his back, holding him, maybe even consciously getting off on it. Eddie has thought a number of disparaging things about his own dick in the last couple of weeks (and honestly, for most of his life), but Richie’s dick is inexplicably fascinating and immune to criticism. He remembers, bodily, the sensation of perfectly ordinary erectile tissue up against him through at least three layers of clothing. Is Richie wearing underwear at all? He said he sleeps naked, so did he bother to put on more than one layer?

The question is alarmingly hot. Eddie wants to admonish himself, even as he closes his eyes and leans forward slightly. His shoulder braces on the cool tile and his body wants to flinch away from the cold. The spray of the shower head lands further down his back and runs over his lumbar and ass and down the backs of his thighs. Eddie’s head is full of the idea of pushing Richie onto his back, how easy it was this morning and how willingly Richie allowed it. If he were braver, he could shove Richie onto his back and hold him shoulder to shoulder like this, arch up to make room between their bodies, slide Richie’s sweatpants over his hips. He imagines Richie’s dick springing up, getting caught on the waistband.

His brain is dozy, drifting, seizing onto pleasing images and playing them almost like a dream again. His body is insistently awake. He doesn’t have to think about what he’s doing, what this looks like. He just spreads his palm and feels the tingle of hot water all the way into his fingertips, and then he wraps his hand around himself with intent.

The pleasure aches all the way from his hips down into his thighs and up into his stomach. It radiates outwards like pressing on a bruise pushes sensation all the way to the edges. If his eyes weren’t closed already, they would do so now of their own accord. He barely registers the cold tile warming to his skin or the ache in his ribs; everything comes second to the squeeze of his own hand. His toes curl slightly against the tile and he lets himself arch into it. It’s good. He didn’t expect it to be this good. He’s on painkillers, but it’s like they aren’t working at all—not because he’s suffering but because he’s so present, it’s hard to imagine that this might be a muted sensation, that he might be able to have more.

He leans into the tile a little bit harder, distributing his weight between the point of his shoulder and his heels, making sure he’s secure on the wet floor. His little toe slips into a line of grout and holds there. The slick sound of wet skin punctuates the hum of the shower spray. Eddie’s mouth opens a little as he strokes and he imagines doing this to Richie, imagines Richie’s mouth doing the same thing, his head tilting back on the mattress, and he has to bite his lip. He finds himself panting.

He wants it to be good. He wants it to be so good that he can’t help but respond, that no one could possibly blame him for wanting this, that it’s the natural thing to do, that there’s nothing wrong with it at all. His body seems happy to respond, flushed and aching and pushing harder into his hand. His hips jerk back to keep space between his pelvis and the tile wall so that his hand has room to work. There’s no coaxing his body into cooperation, no having to work himself up into hardness, just a bodily awareness that comes with desire, and a tingling heat that comes from inside and outside and from his stroking hand and his slick cock—down into his thighs, up into his navel. There’s a soft sound as he goes harder, as the slide of his fist thuds down against his pubic bone. His breathing keeps hitching and he makes himself hold it steady, let it out softly.

Would Richie pant like this? Would he turn his head into the pillow to muffle himself, or would he tilt his head back and be loud and let Eddie hear him?

He feels himself twisting more towards the wall, cold tile touching not just his upper arm but also the points of his shoulders, the flat of his unscarred cheek. It doesn’t matter. He’s curling around his hand like the pleasure is a tiny flame he has to guard and protect, but that’s okay too, because he’s sturdy enough to keep it safe. The muscles in his legs strain, lines of tendons and muscles from heel to ankle to calf to glutes keeping him upright. He bites down too hard on his lower lip and the little shock of pain startles him, makes his dick jerk in his hand. He takes another breath. He can feel pleasure rising like pressure from his pelvic floor up into his chest. Is this what it’s supposed to have felt like all along, this full-body vise? How does anyone ever do anything else? How does anything get done in this world?

Richie absolutely jerked off over him two nights ago after Eddie made him suck on his neck in the office and Richie dragged him into his lap and arched up against him and Eddie got loud. Richie does this. Richie does this, maybe thinking about him; he wants to see Richie arching for him, Richie’s heels digging into a mattress, feel Richie’s fingers sink into his arm, his thigh, _squeeze_.

He lets his forehead rest against the tile and his sleepy brain offers him the sense memory of the sheer size of Richie, his heavy solidity, the weight of his bones. He knows that Richie does this—maybe spreads out like this, forehead pushed into the back of his arm, biting the inside of his cheek to keep quiet, wondering if Eddie can hear him. If Eddie knows that Richie does this, does Richie know that Eddie does this too? If he found him, would he—would he wrap an arm around him, would he—?

It turns out that everything _was_ muted, because it gets far more intense the closer he gets. This is the plateau stage, he observes dispassionately, as he catches his breath and tries to keep the pace of his hand steady, squeezing tighter, huffing through his nose, pressure building from the center of his body, all his muscles tightening. He’s half hot and half cold where he’s half in and half out of the water, and his skin tingles in the cool air, imagining a hand sliding down his bicep, over the curve of his elbow, catching his wrist, entwining with his fingers and taking over, and a voice asking him, _You want me to touch you?_

Eddie bursts.

His cheek pushes hard into the cold tile and his teeth bite down on nothing; his hips spasm forward to fuck into his hand; his legs strain to keep him upright through the sudden wrench of his center of gravity; his fingers go slick with come; but the pressure doesn’t abate, it keeps building. Eddie—blindsided by an orgasm more intense than any he’s had since he thought he got a handle on how his dick worked—opens his mouth in shock and pleasure, and then it turns out that the pressure in his chest is, in fact, air. He’s been holding his breath for too long, and a loud whine comes out of him before he can bite it off, and then his body drags him over another sharp peak and he bares his teeth like an animal. His throat scrapes around the sound that comes out of him.

In the jelly-legged wake of climax, Eddie finds his ears ringing with the deafening, judgmental pound of the water on the tile, and the ghost of _“hnnnn_ yeeeRRRRFFF” echoing off all the flat surfaces in the bathroom.

The mortification is obliterating. He doesn’t think a damn thing, actually, and his stupid, traitorous body keeps coaxing the last sweet and satisfying pulses out of him without any conscious instruction to his hand. Then, almost automatically, he turns into the hot spray to rinse himself clean. Eddie, feeling more like a ghost bound to a dumb yet happy animal, trembles in shellshock.

And then it turns out that accidentally screaming through furtive masturbation in the middle of the night is the _second_ worst sound Eddie could possibly hear, because the absolute worst comes through the door from the bedroom.

“Eddie?” Richie asks. Sleep rides the edges of his voice, but it’s sharp in alarm and concern.

Eddie panics, unable to think of anything except the conversation they had about the fainting in the bathroom—that Richie might know what he did, or that Richie might _not_ know what he did, and might at any moment come crashing through the door to find Eddie naked and wet and post-orgasmic and only just now softening, horrified in this shower stall. He grabs for the controls to his own mouth and is unable to blurt out anything except what Richie told him to say if he doesn’t need help; and it comes out in the panicky plea of an occupant of a New York City public restroom, when someone knocks on the door, except that instead of an urgent _someone’s in here!_ Eddie squeaks, “Fuck off!”

There is silence.

This is what Eddie died to do, he thinks stupidly. If he had died when he was killed like a sensible human being, he wouldn’t have to live through this moment right now. The humming pipes and the water drumming inside the shower stall and on his body mean nothing, in the oppressive silence of Richie _not saying anything_. Eddie might as well be naked and stinging in the middle of a completely blank mindscape, for how the whole bathroom fades away.

Then Richie replies, “Okay.”

Eddie doesn’t know how long he stands there under the water, trying to convince himself that none of that just happened. Certainly long enough that the plumbing gives him a warning pulse of cooler water, and he takes the hint and turns off the shower. Shivering out onto the bathmat and fumbling for his towel would be bad enough without the tone-deaf happy thrumming of his body, telling him that that was good, that he needed that. Dopamine and other relaxing chemicals flood his system. The muscles in his back feel loose and relaxed and comfortable, and his heavy eyes and head tell him maybe he could get back to sleep now.

Maybe, he tells himself, Richie will go back to sleep and assume that this was all a dream. Maybe Richie didn’t even wake up all the way, just heard a noise and called out to make sure he was okay reflexively. The line between Richie waking and sleeping is thin and mutable. Maybe that will be his saving grace.

He dresses and makes himself open the bathroom door again, slowly and quietly. He turns out the bathroom light immediately so he doesn’t wake Richie up, and then he stands there, blinded by darkness.

Richie is not snoring.

Eddie waits until his eyes adjust before he moves around the bed to his side and crawls gingerly back in. No sooner has he settled than Richie’s long heavy arm wraps around his waist and tugs him back into the curve of his big warm body. Eddie stiffens in surprise, but his body relaxes without his permission, going limp and pliant and happy. It thinks that it just had sex. It’s ready to pheromone bond through cuddling. He’s going through afterglow, whether he wants to or not.

Richie’s face tucks down into the crook of his neck. He draws a long, slow breath in. Can he smell it on Eddie?

“This okay?” Richie mumbles.

Eddie’s heart thuds slow and hard in his ears and throat. Consciously, he tries to take refuge into the happy chemicals flooding his system, leaning into Richie and trying to let his warmth and continued affection soothe the sting of his embarrassment. “Yeah,” he says quietly.

Richie pets his hair a little. Slowly his hand stills and his breathing steadies back out the way it does when he sleeps. Eddie waits until he is sure—he is _sure_ —that Richie is asleep, and then he lets himself exhale and lets the last of the tension relax from his body. The knot in his gut unwinds. He’s weak with exertion and relief, and he lies there, unmoving, secure in the warmth of the bed and their bodies.

Despite everything he’s heard and experienced and been led to believe—he thinks that maybe love and desire can be quite pleasant.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Much thanks to my betas, @qianwanshi and @maddiestern.
> 
> Thank you for your patience while I cranked this chapter out. I hope it was worth it.


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